I've been reading quite a few posts here about new TBC encounters and theres been a bit of discussion around the fact that certain quests/encounters flag people for higher raid zones.

Have Bliz put any system in place to make the backflagging of slackers/new recuits any less painful? It might be that the amount of flagging required isnt' too serious but its always going to be a pain.

If flagging is going to play a major part in the expansion (and personally I love the idea of content that unlocks in this way) I think Bliz should learn from EQ's mistakes and factor some way for a guild who is regularly visiting a particular raid teir to be able to gift a (small) amount of flag tokens to recuits.

One thing I like the look of, is the fact that a lot of flagging seems to be done in 5 man groups which is great. Really nice way to start to seperate the wheat from the chaff amonst applicants.

You can walk into Gruul's and key for Karazhan in a day, but past that things get serious. To sum up, you need Revered with every faction that governs an instance hub, and must complete every raid instance in order of difficulty to access the next one. There is no content skipping in TBC - you must kill the end boss of instance X to enter instance Y. I don't think it'll be that bad, if gear progression properly trivializes older zones. If Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep turn out to be loot farms relative to Gruul and Nightbane, then you might see some nasty keying obstacles for latecomers, because veterans don't want to backtrack, but given Blizzard's track record I find that highly unlikely.

The keying requirements in TBC may serve as "you must be this tall to ride" warning signs; heck, I went to Arcatraz in greens after dinging 70 with someone else's key and was repeatedly obliterated. It may be that you'll need to gear people up in older zones for them to have a snowball's chance in hell at more cutting edge raid content, and keying will get done along the way. I recall bringing newly-60'd healers to Twin Emps and being stunned at their complete uselessness.

I have to admit I'm looking at my old main (hunter) and thinking wow do I really want to go through all this with my druid bearing in mind what a pain in the arse it'll be to switch back to my hunter if I decide to at a later date.

Maybe there will ultimately be quicker ways to get rep (IGE+runecloth!) which would at least lessen the number of normal 5 man runs you had to do.

I don't see them going down any EQ type routes to solve things like this - I think they've made a fairly conscious decision that they want to find less arbitrary ways of solving problems.

More realistically, I'd think, attunements will be a standard prerequisite for most raid applicants. Naxx guilds didn't generally want applicants in ZG and AQ20 gear and a couple of crafted/AH'd epics. Similarly, by the time guilds are working seriously on Vashj and Kael'thas, let alone Hyjal or Black Temple, they're going to want people who have something to contribute.

I see it as more of a pain with regard to alts and such already in the guild, though on the other hand it curbs the "Hi, my greens-laden alt just hit 60 can I bring him to the next BWL to leech gear?" syndrome, and I'm all for that.

I don't see why you couldn't attune on an account rather than character basis.
If your guild wants to bring along the freshly dinged, well good luck to them. Making that alt go through all the content the player has already done and this time with reduced recourse to the guild support network seems needlessly vindictive.

The gearing up would of course be an issue - but that's a guild issue not a game mechanic one. I'd suspect it'd boil down to 'get some heroic loot and you're good' - at a time when everyone else would be less interested in heroic loot.

Or of course it is Blizzard's intent to have us mindlessly repeat the same content over and over again simply because the guild has too much x and not enough y.

I'd also like the mentioned alternative of guild flagging, for much the same reason. It'd alo foster a little more loyalty to your guild, which can't be a bad thing.

I've seen it mentioned several times that flagging is handy for making sure your apps jump through some hurdles and have done some gearing before they apply. I don't know about you guys, but we certainly can't pick and choose between a hundred quality apps. If we can get a good and dedicated player of a class we are light on, he could be dressed in Twill for all I care, we get epics in raids. We probably have a far smaller pool to recruit from than many highend guilds due to being a single-nationality European guild, but we're pretty well off due to reputation. For the guilds that are number 2 and 3 in progression on their faction, they can't demand too much in terms of attunements or gear from their applicants.

Guild flagging would be a new mechanic, which would require some thought to avoid adverse side effects. Implemented wrong, you might get into at least two slightly problematic issues.

1. Guild lock in: Assuming the flag applied to all characters in a guild, but was 'non-transferable', you would end up with a lot of players who may have arrived late to the raiding party, never gotten an individual 'flag' and then can't leave because they would lose their flag. So highly geared members wouldn't be able to move or start their own guilds even though they would be geared for raiding.
2. Pay for flagging: Assuming the flag was permanent and tied to the character. You would get a situation where like bringing Players to buy BOP's, guilds could sell flagging to player who pay to join briefly then could leave with the flag.

Yeah, but how do you intend to differentiate between a good player and a bad player without experience/gear? Quizzing them on their class mechanics? I've read enough Hunter threads here that I could probably impress your average hunter class-leader with my knowledge of the class and its mechanics... despite never having played one past level 5.

If they underperform in your raids/5-mans, you can't take them, but that might be entirely because of their gear. My (60) mage right now has 250 +damage. A 70 mage put through his paces will have more than 3x that, or about more than 60% extra damage on their fireball.

Maybe I won't pull aggro... but I won't DPS/AoE/whatever worth shit, either, I'll have a low HP pool to the point that my survivability would be purely through luck and/or cowardice, and CC/positioning do not alone make a strong player of a given class.

I see your point, and agree with it, that few guilds (probably none outside the top 5 on each faction) have the ability to pick and choose between the best of the best of the best... but, when it comes down to it, would you rather be losing 100's of man-hours gearing/flagging up some jackass that you might accept? Or have those people enjoying their off-time with PvP, or farming upgrades for themselves, when they've already proven themselves worthy members of your raid.

This sort of back-flagging also adds a more concrete relationship between a player and their character. It'll give people more incentive to stick with their character since they've worked so hard on the multitude of things a level 70 can do in terms of progressing through the game.

Rather than have a casual player finish their blue dungeon set (or whatever) and then reroll or quit the game, it presents them with quests as to where to go next. A logical rail of progression which you should go through if you want to see the next level. Similair to a single player game.

Everybody has the "Enter the raid instances and slay bosses" quests, as opposed to pre-xpac where the instances were just there and assumed to be "for the raid guilds; I'll stick to strat run #3099". With the new, lower raid caps, shorter instances (we all know the snoozefest that was MC will never be repeated) and from what we've seen in Karazhan, the option to tackle different wings at zone in will appeal more to a person who swore off raiding than pre-xpac.

Like I said, I think it has a lot to do with getting people attached to their characters. The issue with rerollers and late-comers will be a tedious one for almost every guild, I'm sure; but maybe there will always be a group of people at certain, earlier parts of the BC progression chain.
If it's still too troublesome to go through, they can always just wait for the next xpac. It's never more than a year away.

/\ edit: I agree on this front, as well.

I think it's fairly safe to assume that a guild flagging system would never ultimately tie to a player simply for that reason. Well, aside from the fact that it just doesn't make sense. The idea of guild flagging, as it could be applied to the raiding requirements of the various key chains, seems okay to me. Ultimately, when a guild kills Gruul, the kill is attributed to the guild as a whole, and not just the twenty-five players from the guild who were in the raid when it happened.

For that reason, number one would be a non-issue, in my opinion. If a player decides to leave his guild to form a new one, that guild should be expected to run the gauntlet and prove its worth. Just because its members are geared for raiding doesn't mean those players, when together, are capable of besting the raid bosses. Not to mention that a new guild would only need to clear the older bosses once in order to yet again consider them "old and unbeneficial" content.

It would really be no different than rolling an alternate character is now.

I suppose the only negative to this kind of system would be the issue that existed pre-TBC, wherein anyone could make an alternate character and have it decked out in insane raid gear almost instantly [assuming their guild had x instance on farm]. The current key chains definitely prevent that, and subsequently keep raid gear more exclusive; it was pretty ridiculous when one person could log onto three or four different characters and have tier 2 raid gear on all of them. It's the main reason a guild flagging system would be poor implementation.

Hah, I'm all for that too. However, the flip side of the same situation is "we're trying to learn Gothik/4H and someone has a T2-geared healer alt that can prevent us from canceling the raid," which was probably more important in the long run.