I am in the guild Defiance on skywall, my main's a priest and I do love this game. Defiance is the most progressed horde guild on skywall, which is not to say much as our server is poppulated by a bunch of care-bear loving 16 year olds. Though we had a full head of steam, just cleared AQ up to c'thun in september and have been working slowly 2/3 nights a week in naxx, so finally, November 15th Grand Widow goes down and morale goes sky high, everything seemed so great.

The week before Thanksgiving everyone was saying they were going away, this and that yeah it was cool, no raiding that week, its no problem. We're the most progressed on the server, we've got the server identity, we got a lot of beta slots, we'll be fine.

Skip to today, Saturday, December second, we've not run anything successful in nearly two weeks, I have faith in my guild leader, our recruitment guy, our officers, but it seems like most people just don't show up. Mid-august we had 50-70 people on nearly every night of the week. We can't even run zg now with our 60 alts.

What I can account certain problems with attendance to, is beta. Sure we have 7 people in beta, not bad, 6 more people just quit, they didn't raid well anyway and want to peeveepee more than raid is their explanation. Though one of our three druids went with these six and he's a big loss. The patch, well this I guess would account for the most, many people don't want to raid...why raid when you can pvp for a month and get a purple no problem!? Why do it when its no longer an immense grind for weapons/armor(though it really still is). One guy in our guild just sold his account and he was one of the reasons I ever joined this guild in the first place, a real good raiding shaman, resto all the way. Definite loss.

I regret to bore you with my personal guild attrition, but I read these boards all the time, love all the theorycrafting going on in here, are these attrition problems everywhere? Should we wait for our people to come back from offtime/beta and sit on our thumbs? If and when they do come back should we just welcome them with open arms, "hey haven't heard from you in a month, glad to see you screwed us over in our server leading progression(which only matters for our own pride and experience) lets get some stuff done?"

Wish I could motivate people efficiently as a guild member, though it seems that even my own morale wanes as this attrition goes on. I have a 60 alliance warrior whom is also guilded on skywall, and they've seemed to go into the same rut, only able to really get 20mans going. Someone fix my warcraft! Enough wining from me though, I pray all of your situations are in better shape.
<3

It's a combination of the holidays, burnout, and seperation anxiety.

The only reason my guild is going as strong as it is is because we're so close to clearing Naxx fully; if we didn't have KT as a goal, I suspect a lot more people would just be giving up on raiding.

Don't forget finals season for any college students you may have in guild. That's been a real tough one in my guild, which is largely college aged gamers.

december kills raids for all the reasons above and then some.

Sounds very typical. December is unpleasant to raid anyway - for a lot of guilds college students represent the primary raider base, and they are usually swamped with work for half the month then on break for half the month, so not much gets done. It was similar this time last year, if I recall correctly.

That being said, January-February are usually great months to sit inside and play WoW!

It's going on in my guild, too. There's been a recent outbreak of severe DOTAing nd it's driving me nuts.

Yeah were at Thaddius atm and we seem to be hitting the same wall. /cry

LOL...I never thought I would have seen a defiance player on these boards..

LOL!

And, on topic, yes, I think it's typical for all the reasons noted. On our end, we're basically taking the rest of the month at least off from organized raiding after this timer, and may return to dick around with the new talents/skills in a high-end raid setting in January. People have exams, a lot of professionals have a heightened workload because of the missed days due to the holidays, and before long people will start flying home to family and shitty internet connections and old laptops. No point in trying to force anything at this stage of the game, I figure. Most of us are looking forward to the break, honestly.

About a year ago, we had a very bad problem with this. We'd always joke and say shit like "oh don't worry guys, it's the month before christmas but as soon as the month after christmas is over, shit'll get back to normal". Oddly enough, we have 45+ people online every single night and during some of our most miserable times (ie. wiping on Thaddius for 6 nights in a row due to shit server luck) we'd have wait lists as long as 10+ people.

As much as we'd all like to blame the holidays and whatnot, I believe it plays a very minor role. I think once you get a good, like-minded group of players everyone is eager to log in no matter what time it is.

Expecting this lull in raiding to happen, we went headed and started a raiding merger with the only other alliance guild on Gurubashi, Vigilance, that was close to us in progression. We had gotten to Kel'Thuzad a month ago, but we started having attendance issues that kept us from clearing farm content fast enough, and Sapphiron became unbeatable. Vigilance was up to 4horsemen, but had never been able to put too much time onto them. And yet, this week we were able to clear all 4 wings in two nights, and then Sapphiron on our first potted attempt. Being able to always have geared, skilled, experienced players ready to hop in when needed has made a huge difference.

I think making this big change has energized a lot of people in both guilds about progression. Everyone is really focused and trying hard. It's what we really need to be able to finish off Naxx.

I don't know. We had probably one of our best weeks of raiding this week. We downed both thaddius and gothik for our first times on weds and thursday, hopefully we won't see any of these attention problems and can focus on the 3horsemen and 1 horse lady.

Darn, how close were you guys to KT? If that's public information.

I wouldn't quite use the past tense. We want to kill him within the next two days. We haven't wiped prior to phase 3 in ages, but we never make it to phase 3 in adequate shape to finish the job. If we kill him, great. If not, oh well.

Honestly, our current situation is largely a matter of choice -- a choice not to recruit with the expansion around the corner. That's pretty much why our progress slowed so much right around Labor Day. A number of people quit to focus on school as the summer ended, others had various RL circumstances come up, and then Naxx has taken its usual toll in terms of burnout over the months, and we've gone from a guild based on a model of ~80 raiders who average 60% attendance to having ~60 raiders who still average 60% attendance. That means that every day is a roll of the dice, and has been since mid-September or thereabouts. Sometimes we'll have a pro group and a half-dozen people waiting to get in, and we'll kill 9 bosses in 4 hours. Sometimes we'll have 3 priests and 3 mages show up when we want to do Gothik, or 13 healers when we want to do Sapphiron, or 30 people total, and we won't be able to do much of anything. Kel is tricky when you have 15 melee classes and 3 mages sometimes, and so forth. And thus progress has been like pulling teeth.

Frustrating in the extreme, but the general internal consensus has been that we'd rather tough it out and keep our existing structure going into the expansion, than invite now and find ourselves with a glut of players in two months. Mostly off-topic, but I figured I'd respond since I get people asking me about this a lot.

I'll just post from the opposite perspective of Gurgthock's; we chose deliberately to recruit to finish the existing content, without worrying about the expansion, assuming that simple attrition would be enough to get us back down to xpac raiding numbers; essentially, planning for today and letting tomorrow take care of itself. As a result, we've had such interesting things as a warrior who's tanked Kel'thuzad and 4H, but hasn't ever seen Thaddius die.

It's helped us avoid calling raids, but it probably will lead to long terms problems down the road. But, that's down the road - in the meantime, just like Gurg/EJ, our goal is to kill him in the next two days, before the patch and the holidays turn everything into pain.

Hey if you know warsn, and all skywall does, you know I'm a wealth of knowledge, and where would I get that knowledge if not for these boards? Anyway, thanks for your responses guys, I mean I wish I had some say, and could do something about this attrition, but it seems, that its going to be rocky seas until the xpac. Maybe we'll never see thaddius, 4h, or Kel fall down and give us loot, but its 4am, and I'm ready to admit, it was a good 1.0 session.

Thanks for the responses again.

Ah, okay... I misinterpreted the phrase 'this reset'; didn't mean to imply anything. Best of luck!

Happened last December, has happened every December I can think of while MMO'ing.

I believe its semi typical. As the burnout goes, we've recently had a warrior, and 2 priests leave within the past 2 days.

We've even tried recruiting, but we simply arent able to get the right quality people. We've tried the recruitment forums, but its so damned hard to find people that are truly interested in raiding. We couldnt even recruit/transfer in a rogue that would have 100% raid priority. Sad too, because we had KT 27-40% almost a dozen times now. We've got Loatheb/Sapphiron to do this week, which we will hopefully finish off KT tomorrow. But I fear if we don't do it this week we won't kill him pre-tbc due to reasons outlined above.

We're in a similar position to EJ. We've pretty much come to the decision that we'll only raid 3 days a week from here out - whether we clear the zone or not - and break for the rest of the week. Recruiting at this point for us is simply a bad idea, we have a solid core of raiders to go into the expansion with. If we need to recruit once we reach 70, then we will, but until then I think we're done recruiting unless it's good friends from other guilds that show interest.

It's a nice break after such a long grind of raiding in Naxx - as much fun as the zone is, it still gets stale after a while and becomes more of a chore than anything else. I do think some of the burnout can be credited to the expansion, however, and I can't really blame people that would rather break until the expansion for those reasons - I'm in beta and loving every minute of it so far; the content is all fun and the Heroic mode/Karazhan encounters are all very challenging.

You know that 17 page Rebirth recruitment thread on the Skywall boards? It's because we're having difficulty putting out 38 players +2 apps on a semi regular basis. Much as the few trolls hate us, it's spawned us a noob app zerg and at this point we're not getting terribly picky about the gear on who we take to trials. We just cut a day from our raid schedule because we can't even run BWL with the numbers we get on most Fridays. The people laughing at us spending a month on Thaddius? 4 week ago we got our first look at him. 3 weeks ago we got to spend about 3 raid nights working on him. Had a lot of dc problems. (Go figgure) 2 weeks ago we had 2 hours on him. Last week we called off for Thanksgiving. This week we've cleared everything but Abom wing, but depending on our number counts on Sunday/Monday we may be lucky to get 2-3 hours on him.. half of which will probably be relearning the encounter since we haven't seen it in 2-3 weeks. It's not exactly weeks of solid attempts. It's brought progression to a grinding halt. Nothing we can do really- at the height of our guild population we had 60 raiders in guild total, we've never had a night with more than 48 members online.

1) Our server sucks for recruitment. Even Alliance side. I don't even want to think about the problems you folk must be having. We've literally imported a third to half of our current solid raiders.
2) Holidays sucks for raid schedules. Last winter we saw similar problems although, at that time, it pretty much collapsed our raiding for 5-6 weeks over the stretch of mid Nov-early Jan. A lot more of our player base then was semi casual. Even now we only had one raid night in the raid-lock week that Thanksgiving fell and we're looking at another week to two weeks at Christmas/New Years. Plus we're generally having more people who have parties and family to deal with so overall attendance is slightly down. IF this year follows like last year, we'll have plentiful recruitment in mid-late January as folks get back into the game (especially with the expansion dropping then). Just gotta buckle down and survive until then.
3) The Expansion sucks for raid guilds. Not in an immediate sense of ooooooh my gawd we all suck afterwards- but in the very real sense that everything is getting reset and absolutely nothing you pick up between now and drop date is going to matter. There's a big portion of gamers who play for that sense of progression through gearing- and those players have a difficult decision- keep raiding with no sense of progression? Or spend time with the family and come back when the expansion drops? The exodus has been large enough that it's fairly reasonable to assume that they will eventually be able to get back into a good raiding guild post expac, most guilds are recruiting afterall.

Lump it all together and you've got a nasty cocktail this holiday season for raiding.

General advice: Keep your guild together. Defiance has a recognizable name and despite the trolls you're the furthest progressed horde guild on server. Apps identify you by your name and progress. It's why people fight so hard for server first, second, or third (And frankly, why it's so easy for us to not care about server firsts. When you're 2-3 bosses ahead of the next guild down it's easy to be detached from the race.). Name recognition sells and by the end of this all you may have is your name recognition.... but that's enough. Nightwind survived on name recognition alone for 4 months but couldn't pull it together at the end. From the expansion drop date until the first burst of raiding- guild "positions" will be frozen in the race. You can reasonably call yourself the top progressed horde guild on skywall until probably march (assuming somoene doesn't pull ahead at the last moment) at which point you'll have to start killing raid bosses again to prove it. Being the top guild = more apps, and better quality apps. Keep raiding what you can, keep what raiders you can... and muddle along with the understanding that all you have to do is survive until January 1. Pure momentum will keep people involved from Jan 1 to the drop date.

4-6 weeks of survival gets you the prize- a guild to level in and only rebuilding through recruitment if necessary for the expansion.