I was thinking about the issues that have been present on my server, sargeras, with respect to end game raiding and attendence.

It occurred to me that on some encounters it would be really nice to be able to fill open raid spots with priests (patchwerk), warriors (4h), rogues (loatheb), etc. However, you dont want to take just any old person. At the same time, people are quitting their guilds, or at least high end raiding (see the consumables thread), in what seems to me to be record numbers.

Whereas the expansion will take off a lot of the pressure (people will want to play again, raid size limited to 25), there will almost certainly be times when your raid group is one or two spots short (pally/warr/priest/whatever) and could really use some help, and at the same time there will be a lot of experienced raiders who'd love to see end game content but without the commitment of a full guild membership.

I would suggest that there is probably a "market" for a guild that has no purpose except to provide "temp" and "temp to perm" type raiders to better the end game experience for all involved. This would only work, of course, if members of said <temp> guild were verified as having been end-game raiders in the past:

Pros for guilds:
- wouldnt have to over-recruit classes as much if they know they can get a couple good temps for the night
- via the guild tag, a certain level of expertise is assured (including the temp having consumables, enchanted gear, good spec, mods, vent, understanding what raiding is about)
- can try-before-buying raiders without a formal app process

Pros for <temp> guild:
- low maintenance guild management. No bank, no dkp, no vent, no worrying about too many of one class, etc. Just a roster online somewhere.
- ability for the grizzled vets to see end game content occasionally (and pick up loot that would be sharded)
- ability to experience a variety of guilds, and perhaps even join one if they want to get back into raiding.

Members of this guild would be accepted on a basis of vouchers by friends, and /gremoves would be done by guild votes.

Just some musings I had today while reading through a couple goodbye posts on our guild forums, thinking about what went wrong in some cases, what could have alleviated issues, etc.

Sounds similar to my grandiose plan to recruit every healer on server and extort every other guild into paying our fees to get healers for their raids.

Didn't work out as planned :*(

Probably because you were all feral specced. ;)

Anyways, the "temp" guild does work, having had personal experience with it. Another guild on our server stopped raiding and those that wanted to see KT die before expansion signed on to help fill out raids, with some of them keeping their old guild tag. Most of them didn't spend any dkp, those that did just picked up stuff on rot status and one of them got the Staff Head for his bird stick. However, Merc (I like that term better) guilds live and die by the strength of their reputation (and of course, the reputation of their members). If they pull something stupid (lolninja) or are just outright bad (shocking people on Thaddius or otherwise causing the raid to wipe), well... at that point I hope your own reputation is spotless.

That's awesome and all, but how will they get loot? I mean, if you need a healer for Naxxramas, there's a certain level of gear you need.

The problem there is that how much loot in nax is going to get sharded? Members of the merc guild would have no shot at any competitive loot, and while raiding to experience high end content is fun (if some KT guild invited me on a run while telling me i wouldn't get loot, i would take them up for sure), eventually they will have done the same thing over and over a few times and want some payment for it ie loot.

Meaning that all they will want to come is earlier runs like BWL and AQ40.

hm, perhaps Kolenzo. However, if I didnt have a great guild, had some random T1/T2 stuff, and could "only" pick up AQ stuff that gets sharded, that seems to be acceptable to me as a tradeoff for not dealing with the expectations of being a full guildy. And we definitely have started sharding some Naxx loot. More importantly, however, is that such a group of raiders would (hopefully) be there for the experience and fun as much as, if not more than for, the loot itself.

Yes but that removes the "permanent" part from your temp guild.

At the moment their is a large supply of well geared and experienced people not commited to any particular guild and who wont need much further gearing up as blizzard is doing it through TBC and PVP awards. But that is hardly a long term solution and is more a artificial situation caused by TBC.

We have these people in our guild already. They're called "casual members". They can go PvP if they want to on raid nights, they can keep whatever attendance % they like, they can get an invite to the raid if we have space/need of their class and they can roll on any loot no-one else wants.

I would've definitely joined a guild like this if it existed on Mal'Ganis. I already kind of fall in to this position, with real life friends in a couple different guilds, I end up raiding with different guilds on different nights, and also end up filling in spots for organized PVP. I do end up running a lot more of the stuff that's on farm status (anywhere from zg to aq40 depending on the guild) and usually only pick up gear that no one wants. Although I've actually been able to accumulate a fair amount of DKP with one guild because they thought it was only fair, so I've been able to scoop some Hakkar loot, and the occasional idol, which is nice.

I actually went ahead and started my own guild recently, <dliuG> in recognition of the fact that while I was online most nights raiding or PVPing with some guild or another, I didn't really have "main raider" status with any of them. It's also something of a game theory experiment in a "leaderless" guild (www.dliug.com for more details). If it wasn't so close to the expansion, and the break it brings from raiding, I might've tried to set up <dliuG> as a temp (or mercenary) guild instead, I bet there might be a few other people in a similiar situation that would be interested.

I suspect once we get to level 70 and 25 man raids there will be less demand for something like this because it will be easier to organize the smaller raids, but definitely an interesting idea, and something that would benefit people who are feeling burnt out, regardless of level.

At the end of the day when you break it down people raid for loot, I can't see there being enough incentive for a temp guild to last.

I was thinking of something along these lines once as well, and thought it might be possible to have a Merc-Guild DKP account with the other guilds. So basically the merc guild gets DKP for what ever spot/raid they help on, and the members of the merc guild themselves are responsible of deciding who and when to spend the earnt DKP.

With a tightknit group of mercs, I could imagine this to work. Only problem I saw are raid IDs, so one guy can not join ZG with two different guilds in the 3 day cycle etc.

But many many raids be it Naxx or below are constantly cancelled due to not enough of the right class or people in general.

These mercs would have to be very good skilled people, since reputation would be of major importance.

Thats pretty much how it works in my guild.

We have 25 80%'ers and like 50 20%'ers

Yes but its not a long term solution. Your in partial t1, You merc several guild in BWL. You pick up say two peices of t2.

3 month later those guilds are in aq40 and looking for mercs with say 50% t2 which you dont have.

I am not saying it doesnt work for individuals ,in the dieing days of bwl , we invited a non guilded warlock who runs with our pvp group and he went from 2/8 t1 to 5/8 t3 in 3 weeks.

But between that factor and cherrypicking ie "Wow this guy is good lets get him guilded with us" I doubt a "permanent" temp guild would survive.

A merc Guild would work much much much better with no instance reset timer. In fact it would probably work out as members of leading guilds selling their services to guilds that are progressing behind them.

Also A merc guild would proabably flourish only on a high pop, highly competitive server.

We've killed KT twice.

Everything but hat/legs/chest for war/rog tokens is on rot for us now. I think we *might* have one DPS warrior who'd like DN boots for his tanking set, but, meh.

Tokens go to rot *very* quickly. They may not be able to pick up weapons or trinkets, but if a pool of not dumb players were around that we could fill raids from, I can't see why they wouldn't be able to get enough T3 to be reasonably competitive as subs.

MC->BWL is no longer really an applicable transition. Say you were brought to AQ40 by a Naxx farming guild, you could easily score 3 pieces, or maybe 5 pieces of Tier 2.5 just in one run. Then when you go to Naxx, you're probably going to pick up a few pieces of Tier 3 as well. As Kalman said, things go on rot status very quickly with the token system (which is a Good Thing™). Gearing to meet the demands of an instance won't be a huge problem, really.

As for the cherry-picking thing, there are two things that address that in the first post. First is that a Merc may not necessarily be able to commit to full time guild membership (i.e. doesn't want to raid regularly or schedule does not allow it). The other thing is that Merc guilds could be used as potential recruitment grounds (no formal app process), but without the commitment that being an actual recruit comes with.

Warriors / Rogues were probably 1/3 of our raid force, if not more, so it worked out okay.

A permament temp guild would be great if it could actually work, the problem is if the 'temp' guild players were actually well-geared and good enough to be in a 40 man, they'd get recruited by somebody.

Also as far as rotting loot, I think we were up to 1 token slot on rot status after 4 KT kills, and after you're on "farm status" its a lot easier to flexible with your raid then progression nights, when you need temps.

Idea was tossed around by our guild many months ago to possibly start a sister casual guild or status for people who were family and friends or perhaps who just couldn't raid enough- we'd get to cherry pick the best of them for full guild membership and they'd have a nice shelter guild with a solid reputation and an acknowledged allegiance to one of the top guilds on server. There were a lot of convincing arguments for it, but when it boiled down- it takes a certain kind of mindset to be satisfied with always being the B team or brought on in case of emergency. Being relegated to the back seat isn't appealing for most folks. It generally leads to splinter guilds and dissatisfaction. All the sorts of things we simply don't want to deal with. Of course the biggest hangup for us was that a lot of the people in this sister guild would be family members or friends of questionable ability... and cherry picking people out of the sister guild one at a time, by it's very nature, would lead to the kind of "but I've been waiting for MONTHS and she was only here 2 weeks!" drama that I absolutely despise. Suddenly you've got a responsibility to people guilded in the sister guild who would never make it through an outright trial.

Best proceed with caution.

A few thoughts.

1) I don't think this kind of guild would survive on Skywall. As it stands we've imported anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of our current guild members from other servers. I love Skywall, but our population is hopelessly casual. I don't know how we manage to get queue'd on week nights- most people aren't raiding much past BWL that's for sure. the longer I play the fewerguilds I see who are progressing past ZG. We must have a million UBRS runs going.... We've got 4 Naxx guilds- the farthest is only 11 bosses in- next farthest is another 3-4 bosses behind. Rebirth is really considered an exception on our server. 6 day a week raiding? LOL. Crazy people with far too much time on their hands. Other servers have double the Naxx guilds and several guilds with large time commitments. Then again, this kind of solution would be perfect for us- a merc guild full of experienced people who only want rotting loot... Then again we'd probably spend half our time trying to convince the mercs to give up their merc ways and join us full time. Solid raiders with okay gear? Quick Ma, get your stun gun- we might have to beat this one senseless before it'll accept tagging.

I'm serious- if it's a solid raider with halfway decent gear on server it's either tagged within a week by Immix (the only top end guild that tags thier apps immediately, and damn them for it- makes it hard to convince people to wait out the 2-3 weeks of trails for our guild when they can get tagged RIGHT NOW by #2) or they're chilling out in front a Naxx waiting for a Rebirth/EU trial run... or they're waiting for their transfer off server because they've blackened their reputation so badly they can't get tagged. The only other exception are the rare folks who've retired from raiding or the night owls working to get into the only serious aussie raiding guild on server.

2) (and somewhat off topic, although it relates in general) I've never heard of other people mentioning Shelter guilds before- but it's a fairly common thing on Skywall. A guild that exists solely to shelter people apping with other guilds from guild invite spam or harassment from thier old guild or random guilds that see a highly geared toon. It really came to my attention the first time we managed to recruit a forum troll- who then had to find a shelter guild to get away from the dozens of guild invite offers while they had their (incredibly short for us) trial. We actually had to remove our requirement that all our apps be totally unguilded because we couldn't make half of our apps abandon their shelter guilds for 2-3 weeks. It was considered pretty cruel and we had to rush people through before they simply gave up. Do all servers have this kind of harassment problems? A transfer logs in to IF and by the end of the night the top guilds know their name, their gearing, which guild they intend to app to, and generally whether they're ebay'd or not. There's really not much room for free floaters atm- we've got the "hardcore" population to support 2 generously sized high end guilds and we seem to be trying to man 3-4 (depending on whether you count the aussies who have a very different recruitment pool) out of the warm bodies available.

Honestly with the kind of tiny barracuda pool of high end guilds on Skywall- I can't see a merc guild surviving more than 2-3 months before it's better members were siphoned off and it was left with whatever no one else wanted. =/

It'd be really convenient to ahve though.

The biggest sticky point is probably your requirement of a temp having a raid spec and bringing their own consumables. Those are arguably the least fun parts of raiding. If you are OK with those requirements then you can probably find a home in a raiding guild full time even if you do not raid that much.

Farming for consumables without the promise of loot is probably not going to be a big seller.

From personal experience:

Step 1: Get an unguilded level 60 druid
Step 2: Spec tree form
Step 3: Pop tree form and nonstop healbot in BGs for a day
Step 4: Watch masses of guild invites from random servers roll in.

I'd never want to spend any more time untagged than nessesary. The last time I was untagged for more than a few minutes (due to the GL discovering that /gdisband != disband group), I had pretty much every raid guild on the server ask me if I was interested in joining -- despite a post on the realm forums where we made fun of the GL for his nubbery. When the guild later transfered off the server (with me not going with them), I had multiple people asking me if I was interested in joining thier guild, despite still being tagged.

When I transfered to Cenarius, I spent slightly under 2 minutes untagged in IF. During this time, four people asked me where I transfered from, and if I was looking for a guild. Cenarius is not a server lacking in raiders, with 16 alliance guilds that have killed a boss in Naxx, and I'd imagine it'd be worse on a server that was. As a result, I'd never app to a guild that requires I stay untagged for the duration of the app process (I was actually about to submit an app to a guild when I noticed they required that), as there's plenty of guilds that don't have that requirement. As someone who is not a bad player, not badly geared, and not terrible at writing, there's a huge number of guilds I could apply to with a decent chance of getting a trial (pretty much every alliance raid guild that needed priests and was on a US-PvE server (which would be 86 if there's one guild per server needing priests I'd want to be in)), there's no reason to app to the one that makes the process less pleasant, if I think they'd otherwise be equal.

I spent a week or so untagged between guilds about 6 months back (so this is before the Naxx healer-feeding-frenzy and before server transfers), and in that time I got 16 distinct ginvite offers from guilds on server. Of which, approximately 4 actually knew me, rest were just "Unguilded paladin in half T2? grab it!".

@Bekah - have you considered making your own app/shelter guild? Sounds like the simplest solution to an arbitrary problem.

And back on-topic, I think with Malygos' current server population, a temp guild would get raided for decent members fairly quickly.