Originally Posted by Trouble

There's a lot of ingredients that go into a raid, but they can basically be broken down into two general categories: quality of leadership and quality of players. Quality of leadership involves ability to motivate, ability to keep people focused, ability to strategize in a timely and efficient fashion, ability to identify problems and solutions, and things like that. Quality of players involves tenfold different qualities but the ones you're talking about mainly are ability to adapt and ability to learn and execute quickly. Your further progressed along enough that these are not basic L2P problems (I hope) such as bad dps, basic healing, basic situational awareness.

On the leadership end, there has been plenty of cases that we dragged our feet learning an encounter, along the way blaming various people in the raid (who may or may not have made legitimate mistakes) but in the end what it really came down to was not solid strategy. There are strategies that will work assuming everyone plays perfectly, and there are strategies with built in redundancies so people can make mistakes and you can still win. It's usually subtle differences between the two that will make or break you. The basic strategy for a fight is usually well documented, but adapting the small bits and pieces to your specific raid makeup and abilities is important on moderately challenging fights. Things like healer class makeup, what tanks you have available, how many AoE classes available, etc. all subtly or greatly influence your strategy.

On the player end, I hate to say it, but one of the conclusions I've come to is that usually people who are lacking the things you need will not usually improve. At the basic L2P level most people can be taught (more accurately TOLD) how to gear themselves, what buttons to press in what order to get the most DPS, basic things like that. But the big three people usually show very little improvement even over a long time: situational awareness, quick learning curve, and ability to improvise. Those three abilities are what separate ok raiders from great raiders. Whether these are talents people have from birth, or come from years of gaming experience, or something else, I don't know. But it's been clear to me that people either have them or they don't.

The conclusion I draw from that is that ultimately one of the primary things a guild can do to improve is to simply replace people who aren't up to par. I really just don't expect improvement from people and when it becomes clear that they can't keep up with a certain level of content they need to be replaced. The problem is that that's way easier said than done. As someone mentioned before, the people you want to replace often have friends in the guild, or are genuinely nice people, or have been in the guild forever and you in part owe them for getting to where you are. It's not an easy answer, but I can at least tell you how we did it.

The first step (which may or may not be done) is to identify the goals of your guild. Given your progression level you're probably closer to having done this compared to say a guild trying to kill Magtheridon. This is important because it helps define what ends you're willing to go to and to what goal those ends are for. We say "we are a raiding guild with the primary goal of defeating end-game content while having fun". The extension of that, and we make this clear to everyone joining the guild, is that we expect a certain level of performance from our members. A raid slot is a privilege, not a right. You earn and maintain that raid slot with reliability and skill. Because the situation is extremely clear, if we need to bench someone permanently then it is understood. We don't gkick people for poor performance in general because they usually become part of the family, but they do have their raider rank taken from them. The understanding, whether we actually say it out loud or not, is this "We like you, we wish you could come with us, but you're a liability to the raid that we just can't afford. We're sorry."

The next step once you establish a way to bench people who can't cut it is recruitment. Most comments I've read and things I've heard indicate to me that people really just don't know how to effectively recruit as a general rule. To me, the whole recruiting process is the most important component in whether a guild is successful or not. Your guild IS the people who are in it, and those people come from recruiting. Many people make the mistake of thinking of the "guild" as some entity that goes beyond the members that make it up, and as such should somehow have properties like "skill" that are different from the members in it. A guild IS the people in it! If those people suck then the guild sucks.

Once you grasp how important the quality of people in your guild is, the followup logically is that recruiting should be very important to you because it is the lifeblood of your guild. Why not spend a decent amount of time trying to do it right? There's a lot of little details that you can discover on your own through reading some other threads on here or maybe elsewhere, but there's a few big lessons that many people miss:

1.) Your own server is not your only recruiting pool. I hear this all the time from recruits joining my own guild: "Our guild died because our server died, there was just no one to recruit!". Going back since the day server transfers opened, 95% of our recruits have been from other servers. Why would you restrict yourself to your own server when there is this giant pool of apps from 250 servers? Put your ads out there on as many places you can. WoW Recruiting Forum, Bosskillers, worldofraids, wherever the hell else has listings (80% of our recruits find us on the WoW recruiting forums).

2.) Write long recruiting posts that describe in detail who you are, what you expect, and what you're looking for. You're looking for a MATCH, not just a random schmo. The more detailed you are, the more you look like you know what the hell you're doing, the more the good apps are interested in you. They're looking for a good guild too remember, and you need to do your best to prove that you are with your first impression. You do this by showing you know what qualities an ideal app should have.

3.) Get to know people before you recruit them. On your application, you don't just need the mechanical things like gear and raid experience. Find out their age, where they're from, ask a few somewhat open ended questions to see if they'll open up a write some interesting info. Things like that. You're not just recruiting a raid bot to execute commands for phat loots, you're looking for someone who will fit into your guild personality and become part of the team. If you get an app that you like and seriously consider for the spot, voice chat interviews are a MUST. When we started doing these we seriously upped our success rate with applicants. Have a list of general questions to touch on, maybe some side notes or things to induce conversation, try to get them to open up a little so you can get a feel for their personality. If you don't feel like you could run a smooth voice interview then find someone in the guild who can conduct it and listen in. It's important that you hear your potential recruit talking and answering questions before you let them into your guild.


I know this wall of text may seem like I'm overdoing it, but I need to reiterate that recruiting is the lifeblood of your guild. Your guild is its members and if you want your guild to improve then you need to improve the quality of the members. Some people end up screwed, benched due to lack of skill. But if your guild's stated goal is success at raiding and there are members that bring you failure, if you don't replace them then all you bring about is the doom of the guild.