My former guild, and the guild several of my friends got into are both in a hiatus at the moment, haven't been able to field raids for a few weeks now. I haven't noticed much personally, I got into the beta at an early stage and stuck there, plus I've moved to Ireland for a new job and I'm trying to find a decent place now.

I imagine quite a few people are also looking into rerolling/leveling their alts up before TBC hits. It'd be interesting if we could see how many new druids and warlocks the server has had created since mid-November... ;p. Those looking for Blood Elf and Draenei alts prolly don't feel like throwing more precious gold into the moneypit that's Naxx for a few measly upgrades for a class they might not want to play again.

Personally after seeing the current mockery that is class balance on Beta/PTR, I choose to forego my warrior for either a Blood Elf Pally or Orc Lock. I'm sure it has scared some other classes into the above line of thought as well.

For us, it's been a matter of stubbornness as much as anything. We've never recruited (see now-foolish-sounding sticky atop these forums) so picking up a couple of people just to clear Naxx would come as more of a drastic step. Literally, since the MC/BWL days we've added a total of one person to our raid force, and that was someone from the server that many of us have played with and PvPed with and so forth for a long time prior to the invite. I think that the past months have proven to us that that simply is not sustainable the way WoW's raid game has played out. Naxx requires too much raiding time and punishes you too much for bringing inexperienced people to fights for that to continue to work. If not for the change to 25-mans, we would be recruiting right now, because we're really a bit below critical mass for sustained 40-man raiding going forward. But the change is timely enough that there seems to be no need. Also, I'm not too concerned about keeping people occupied, because I think all the new mechanics changes, skills, and talents, combined with the new PvP system, will keep everyone busy for a month while we set aside major raiding. Just about everyone has some piece of PvP reward loot they want to grab, or has an alt they want to get decked out in time for the expansion.

We took most of thanksgiving week off - might take some of the next week off; we can get so much loot just doing a couple days a week, but I don't wanna burn our guys out.

Every guild out there seems to be feeling the latest attrition - remember the AQ attrition?
Remember the mid-naxx attrition? There have been points in this game that have just been brutal on raiding guilds. This month is going to be no exception I think.
My philosophy though is to keep raiding but make it as fun and unstressful as possible (although I went off on our warriors at KT last night pretty good :)). Still, I like your idea of just taking the month off... we may seriously just take next week off to acclimate and get our GUI's working again.

We've all earned a nice long break after the insane Naxx-push. Still if you can finish the whole thing in 3 days and skip the rest, thats pretty light I suppose.

We're in the same position as EJ, AM, Kalman's guild, and a few others, if you replace "K'T" with "Four Horsemen." I've been using the end of Naxx as a motivating factor this whole time, and so far it's worked well. We haven't missed a single raid due to attendance (although that's easier for a 4-day/week guild as schedules tighten up). We have recruited as necessary so far.

When the patch announcement came last week, I said, "Horsemen or bust." We replicated Gothik on Tuesday, and got Mograine down Thursday. So it's coming right down to the wire with tonight's and Monday's raids. This is heavily what's keeping the guild going.

We are ostensibly planning to continue raiding after the patch though. I've already made posts explaining the UI changes, telling classes what to expect already, and we bumped Tuesday's raid to Wednesday so people can use Tuesday to get "settled in."

If we get the 4H kill tonight or tomorrow, then anything that comes after it is icing, but people are enthusiastic. If anything, the inclination will be to raid more if necessary for a real shot at Sapph/K'T. Everyone knows we have the huge break coming with TBC, so people are willing to push. If we don't get either of them though, I won't be terribly disappointed; we've had an incredible run in Naxx.

Taking the attitude of NA NAN NANANAN CAAN'T HEAR YOU EXPANSION AND END OF DECEMBER HOLIDAYS has worked well for us. We keep recruiting to keep our roster solid and I'm sure we'll pay a bit of a price for that come expansion, but our goal right now is to keep solid progression and mainly to keep our guild and reputation strong so that when we do hit expansion we have a solid foundation to build on. One of the main fears we have (the officers) is that if we called off raiding getting started back up at the expansion will be that much harder. When you let your members lose focus by taking an extended absence from raiding, they tend to find lives and other things to do with their time. Suddenly the expansion and WoW in general becomes less important. We intend to keep that focus as long as possible.

While completely true, everyone has to laugh at the fact that this sounds like something a drug dealer would say. :P

We were having these problems pre-Thanksgiving but have brought in a crop of recruits. It certainly seems like the right decision now that we had a server-first Loatheb this week, whereas last month we were bringing along undergeared friends to come to Naxx. I would think that the attrition problems would be more prominent in a mid-tier guild relative to server progress, though.

Can't deny it, it's true. Fact is that most people have to make real life sacrafices in order to do upper tier raiding. Without the constant infusion of crack err progression some people are much more likely to make the break.

This kind of attrition has certainly hit us hard, and we have recruited as heavily as possible to compensate. My perspective is that I would rather recruit far too much than in any way too little. If you have a few too many people on the list, you can deal with the friction and drama that might generate. If you have enough people that you have to run two raids to keep them satisfied, that is administrative hassle that you can work around. If you have a larger pool of people so that loot gets spread thinner than normal, you can compensate by raid stacking or extra consumables. All of these things are problems that can be met, challenged, and surmounted.

If you don't have enough people online, you aren't running a raid. That is a problem that you can't deal with. Lack of raiding attendance is hugely demoralizing and there is no solution to most of its causes (mainly IRL concerns that prevent people from devoting as much time to their hobbies.) The only reliable solution is recruitment.

Virakar is a guild that has had many branches in various games, and the one lesson that both guild leaders (former and current) and multiple branch leaders will tell you is this: Never close recruitment. To quote Switchblade from these boards, "To stop recruitment is to die as a raiding guild."

One of the two most remarkable things about EJ, in my evaluation, has been their ability to evade this law of online gaming for two years with no (until VERY recently) noticeable consequences. I would credit that from my limited knowledge to excellent leadership, a foundation that is more than "just" being a raiding guild, and a huge pool of people from which to draw.

We have recruited to compensate with no regard for the vagaries and new requirements of the expansion. We'll deal with it as we know what to expect, but we'd rather raid now and have some drama later than have to call it quits now and sit on our thumbs until mid-January.

next week is certainly going to be interesting... anyone else betting that one or two naxx bosses will be bugged so that they are unkillable? perhaps one or two others will be killable by just 15 people to balance that out lol

i also think many of our healers have gotten very used to decursive/emmonitor and the changes will hit them like a brick.

Cult Leader. I came home cracking up laughing after a social psychology class in which we discussed the 7 habits of highly successful cult leaders.... it was disturbingly close to home.

Then I sobered up for a bit and told myself I would be terrible if I considered using my information in any way in wow >.>