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.

Very similiar situation in my guild. We finally got over the Patchwerk hump just before Thanksgiving and things are looking good, then it all fell apart after that. But I remember last year that December was very lousy for numbers too. It's a bunch of reasons -- beta, finals, winter break, etc.

Still extremely disappointing for me personally as we were on the verge of getting cracks at all the other end wing bosses.

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.

We have seen this as well. A couple people have pointed out that the releases of the Playstation 3 and Wii have also contributed to this effect. I think a lot of WoW gamers are the type of people to buy a Wii, for example, and then got sucked into playing virtual bowling or whatever with their families over the holiday weekend and week after.

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.