We couldn't raid last Saturday, since not enough people were online. The target was Naxxramas, so no one can say that the people were too scared to show up. You can't really fail in Naxxramas (unless you are so bad that you'd fail in a random HC).
There were more people online when we went to ICC5 HC, despite that's much harder, and according to many naysayers, impossible. So it's not the fear.
Nor it can be lack of interest. There are 79 accounts in the guild, and only 19 of them has not logged in for more than a week. So we have 60 active players. Granted, only 21 are lvl 80 and some of them are also inactive. But still, we have enough people to raid Naxx.
It is the casual-curse. Playing casually means, well ... playing casually. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. This also means that the raid depends on a random factor: are there enough people are online or not.
There are two countermeasures against this. The first is forced attendance: you must have X% attendance, or you are kicked. This is the very opposite of "casual" as you have a booked appointment and you must make it, even if you don't want to. This is the defining criteria of "HC". While most HC players are good, it's not a criteria. There are several suck-HC guilds that are very busy "gearing up" their members for ICC. You are HC if you change your RL schedule according to your playing schedule.
I want to keep casual. There are several reasons for that:
The only non-HC countermeasure to the casual-curse is heavy overbooking. If we have 100+ members, we will surely be able to run 10 man raid, and may even a 25 men. Strike that, if we would have 500 members, we could surely run several 25 mans.
If overbooking is so obvious, why is it not used? I mean why there are no 1-2 large casual raiding guilds on every server, where people practically PuG the content using guild members?
The answer is social: most people want to be in a virtual "group of friends". He doesn't want to be in a guild where he knows nobody and every raid he heals a different tank. He wants to chat, and the chat with 100+ people can be nothing else than the Dalaran general chat.
So a successful casual raiding guild is necessarily anti-social. The guild chat is merely for technical reasons, and it's normal that you don't know anyone in your raid (besides you know they can do their job).
This means that the success or failure of the blue geared project will depend not on Saurfang (as the naysayers think), but on the idea of the "anti-social, casual guild". We have one advantages over any other guilds: we are the only blue guild in the EU. If you want to raid in blues, you must come here, or abandon the idea.
So: if you are interested in raiding blues, or even only in the concept "raiding casually, but successfully", join. You can see the class distribution here, but it really doesn't matter, as the point is exactly overbooking. Just because you see 50 mages, you can still come as mage, as there are no fixed amount mage spots, nor fixed owners of those spots. If there are 17 DPS spots and there are 20 DPS online, 15 of them mages than... we'll argue a lot over who put Focus magic on who and who's gives the improved scorch/winter's chill. Bring the player, not the class.
I'm mostly (remember, I'm casual too) online somewhere between 18:30-20:00 every day, as Koltas or Koltes. Everyone gets inv and 100G, raider promotion and 1000G comes on 80, after you shown you can play. Until now, no one was permanently turned down here. Some were told to "read more resources, practice more" with some advice I could give, and they passed the test next time. Or the next time. Or the next. Granted, some left during the process on their own.
PS: many people claim that they are in a casual guild that is progressing. In these "casual" guilds the leadership and the tank/healer corps is HC. The same people tank, lead the raid or do main healing every raid. The DPS and the off-healers rotate casually. Without the HC core, the "casual" guild dies.
Other guilds claim that they are "casual", since they raid only 3/week. Frequency does not matter. If you raid only once a week, but attendance is enforced or somehow rewarded (you get loot priority if you have higher attendance), then you are HC. Casual can come and go whenever he wants and the only consequence of not showing up is not being there.
There were more people online when we went to ICC5 HC, despite that's much harder, and according to many naysayers, impossible. So it's not the fear.
Nor it can be lack of interest. There are 79 accounts in the guild, and only 19 of them has not logged in for more than a week. So we have 60 active players. Granted, only 21 are lvl 80 and some of them are also inactive. But still, we have enough people to raid Naxx.
It is the casual-curse. Playing casually means, well ... playing casually. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. This also means that the raid depends on a random factor: are there enough people are online or not.
There are two countermeasures against this. The first is forced attendance: you must have X% attendance, or you are kicked. This is the very opposite of "casual" as you have a booked appointment and you must make it, even if you don't want to. This is the defining criteria of "HC". While most HC players are good, it's not a criteria. There are several suck-HC guilds that are very busy "gearing up" their members for ICC. You are HC if you change your RL schedule according to your playing schedule.
I want to keep casual. There are several reasons for that:
- I'm afraid of passive-aggressive reactions. The guy doesn't want to play, but he must, so he plays in a way that punishes us for making him play. (note: you can't kick him, since you included him exactly because you had no other option)
- I also don't want to do it myself. If I'm tired or have RL work, I won't log in.
- The basic idea of the M&S is "play time = result". They always claim that they do 1200 DPS simply because they play less. To beat them, I must raid casually.
The only non-HC countermeasure to the casual-curse is heavy overbooking. If we have 100+ members, we will surely be able to run 10 man raid, and may even a 25 men. Strike that, if we would have 500 members, we could surely run several 25 mans.
If overbooking is so obvious, why is it not used? I mean why there are no 1-2 large casual raiding guilds on every server, where people practically PuG the content using guild members?
The answer is social: most people want to be in a virtual "group of friends". He doesn't want to be in a guild where he knows nobody and every raid he heals a different tank. He wants to chat, and the chat with 100+ people can be nothing else than the Dalaran general chat.
So a successful casual raiding guild is necessarily anti-social. The guild chat is merely for technical reasons, and it's normal that you don't know anyone in your raid (besides you know they can do their job).
This means that the success or failure of the blue geared project will depend not on Saurfang (as the naysayers think), but on the idea of the "anti-social, casual guild". We have one advantages over any other guilds: we are the only blue guild in the EU. If you want to raid in blues, you must come here, or abandon the idea.
So: if you are interested in raiding blues, or even only in the concept "raiding casually, but successfully", join. You can see the class distribution here, but it really doesn't matter, as the point is exactly overbooking. Just because you see 50 mages, you can still come as mage, as there are no fixed amount mage spots, nor fixed owners of those spots. If there are 17 DPS spots and there are 20 DPS online, 15 of them mages than... we'll argue a lot over who put Focus magic on who and who's gives the improved scorch/winter's chill. Bring the player, not the class.
I'm mostly (remember, I'm casual too) online somewhere between 18:30-20:00 every day, as Koltas or Koltes. Everyone gets inv and 100G, raider promotion and 1000G comes on 80, after you shown you can play. Until now, no one was permanently turned down here. Some were told to "read more resources, practice more" with some advice I could give, and they passed the test next time. Or the next time. Or the next. Granted, some left during the process on their own.
PS: many people claim that they are in a casual guild that is progressing. In these "casual" guilds the leadership and the tank/healer corps is HC. The same people tank, lead the raid or do main healing every raid. The DPS and the off-healers rotate casually. Without the HC core, the "casual" guild dies.
Other guilds claim that they are "casual", since they raid only 3/week. Frequency does not matter. If you raid only once a week, but attendance is enforced or somehow rewarded (you get loot priority if you have higher attendance), then you are HC. Casual can come and go whenever he wants and the only consequence of not showing up is not being there.
36 comments:
There are non-social reasons to want to raid with a consistent group every raid night. The most obvious reason is that if I raid with a particular group all the time, I KNOW that each person in the raid can do their jobs. If I'm just in a PUG within a large guild, the only assurance I have that the people in the group are good is that they follow whatever rules are necessary to stay in the guild. That is of no value compared to my own experience.
The other reason is that teamwork is actually important to a successful raid. Or any group activity for that matter. Whether it's "social" or not, almost everyone is WAY more effective at their job in a group when they are working with people they know. Part of that is practical. People work better when they know what the people around them are capable of doing. In a raid, knowing who's a good tank healer and who's a good raid healer is WAY better than just randomly assigning healers. The other part really is social though. All else being equal, I'd rather run with good people who I also enjoy spending time with. I won't raid with crappy players because I otherwise like them, but is there really something wrong with preferring good players I like to good players I don't?
Yep. Our "casual" guild progresses mostly due to about 15 really dedicated players.
That's okay, though. My guild is more social for me than utilitarian. We get stuff down, and people are actually improving as it becomes apparent that ICC won't be a pushover like ToC.
I really wish I could play on EU servers. The US side of undergeared isn't really moving as fast as I'd hoped.
Just reading about how you guys have cleared icc heroics has made me excited.
I agree with the idea that your guild should be completely casual, if only to prove a point to the M&S that confuse playtime with skill.
Being overgeared turns dungeons into quasi-mindless buttonbashing (they even have addons that tell you which button to hit)
I think you should add the rule that nobody is allowed to use addons and macro's that would dumb down the game.
2 points here:
1) Blizz need implement "Alliances" so anti-social casual guilds could have a larger friendly pool base to PUG
2)damn! you're horde! :/
This is exact reason, why I better casually pug raid with some friends and some randoms, instead of joining a guild, that requires a attendance percent, but still fail. I know, i've joined as 'lf lastspot' for some role in raids of some of these guilds. All the internal QQ and failing at simple things has been just terrible.
Then again there is one casual guild which does exact: just brute-forces content with the numbers, since they have ~500 total members. They are totally on par with the most hardcore guild, which raid like 5 evenings a week 4-5 hours each. With 70% required attendance, etc.
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I used to be the GM and lead raids for a casual raiding guild. Looking back on how it went, there is one thing that I would do differently. Instead of requiring people to sign up for raids I would require them to sign off for raids. In other words it would be assumed that you are coming, you have to specifically communicate that you cannot come, not that you can come.
This would probably not change attendence all that much, but it would give a much better idea as to whom you would have for a run.
I don't think that one raid a week for three hours is all that much to ask. I do think however, that the time of it could be changed. Prime time Saturday night can be difficult for a lot of people. When I organised raids, (and I did so for a couple of years), Saturday night was the most difficult time to organise for. The easiest was Sunday night.
You seem to spend a great deal of time defining what "HC" is. I'm going to question whether your guild is HC or casual then. This is your statement:
"If you raid only once a week, but attendance is enforced or somehow rewarded (you get loot priority if you have higher attendance), then you are HC."
I dare say you'll be rewarding people who have higher attendance by giving them first priority on runs.
My "casual" guild does that as well.
The problem with (vastly) overbooking is that it only works when people genuinely don't care if they get to raid or not. However, "don't care" is just another curse, which refuses to stop where you want it to. It runs all the way to "I don't care if we wipe, I just want to have a jolly good time".
Also, there is some nice reasoning on why PuGs fail in this article. The same would hold true for a 500-member "casual" guild.
The US Undergeard guild is sitting at 65-67 players, but more than 1/2 haven't logged on in over a month. As it stands now we're probably looking at ICC-10 when everyone that's still active gets up to level 80. We would appreciate transfers, we could probably get a solid 25 man group with a few more people. New characters will probably be too far behind to catch up, but level 50+ transfers should be able to get to 80 with the rest of the active players that are leveling.
Now, to comment on the rest..
The raid size is the primary reason overbooking doesn't work. When Blizzard went from 40 man raids in Classic to 10/25 man raids in TBC it was a guild breaker. Guilds were forced to either scale up to two 25 man groups or downsize to one 25 man group. two 25 man groups was usually not possible because they had a core group of 3-5 people that had to be in the A-Team raid for it to be successful, leaving noone to lead the B-Team.
Having 35 'capable' raiders online and having to leave 10 of them behind without a capable B-team leader is a real put off for those left out of that week's raids. Those 10 people could probably carry a PuG raid through the same content, but there isn't a single person in the group that is capable of herding the sheep, because the experienced and capable players are in the guild only run for the week.
Like you said, casual raiding doesn't really exist. Even casual raiding guilds have some sort of schedule so people know when to be on, in case raids happen to form up. Because of this, you don't want too many people on that might get left behind, or too few that you have to pug in too many people off LFR to fill out the raid.
Without some leadership, there is no guild.. guilds don't spontaneously form. There has to be at least one person to form the leadership that everyone else follows, either by example, inspiration, herding or force.
Leading by example or inspiration is great if the leader really is casual, laid back, no gear score, no worries. Usually this type of guild can only be a social leveling guild. As soon as people start thinking about groups larger than 5 man and raid loot systems it becomes serious business.
When someone wants to start raiding as a guild, they're taking on WORK in the form of herding or forcing their players into coherent raid groups. Usually this leader is going to expect something in return. Their expertise and perfect attendance will guarantee they will get in every raid the guild does, and get choice loot enforced by a loot system of their own making
If you get enough like minded 'casual raiders' at the top of the guild, then you get a hardcore group, the more the merrier, and the more likely one of them will be online at any given time to 'guide' the rest of the guild on the path chosen by the enlightened leaders. Any guild that professes to be 'casual raiding' is probably lead by successful/bored/failed/burnt out hardcore raiders that left their previous raiding guild because they know how to do it better than their former leaders. This core group wants the hardcore raiding experience, without the people from their previous guild. Usually this new leader or group of leaders claims to have a 'better loot system' than their former misinformed/misguided guild. Usually this loot system is complicated but is'completely fair' if you bother to follow the leader's logic. Usually they're looking for fresh meat to train up to be 'successful' raiders following their own formula. They want players that haven't experienced raiding in a top tier guild. Eventually these casual guilds start adding requirements to make sure they can have enough people online for regular progress, such as 75% attendance over the course of a month, to keep 'preferred' raiding status. Of course the core leadership is attending 100% of the raids to maintain their status at the top of the 'DKP' list for loot.
This is an interesting dilemma. I am in the casual boat as I have many more interests than Warcraft, However I not only enjoy it but am more than able to pull my weight in a raid when I play. But I like notice of an event so I can plan other things or at least ask the wife if she doesnt mind me being online. :-)
There is nothing wrong with having calender entries for the guild so people know if raids are coming up. I like this idea as I can see if anything is planned and can choose to go if I wish.
I cannot see why this couldnt be implimented by your goodself, with no obligation of course. But notice of an upcoming raid is more likely to get people, than signing on and trying to get a group together at short notice.
I played around for fun with rawr and checked what dps i would have with blue gear (epix gem, blue trinkets) : down from 9.4 to 5k :D
Very dodgy for ICC, but up to that should be ok. Anub would be a pain. I guess casters are maybe less gear dependant (melee dps here, weapon is a major problem)
It's weird you call hardcore people who prefer a system where appointments are made and kept.
When I go to the doctor, I make an appointment. If I fail to meet it, I could get removed from the NHS register. I guess that makes me a hardcore patient...
This isn't hardcore. This is basic civilised behaviour for any group activity. You might call it hardcore, but for people to make and keep to appointments is actually as 'social' as you could get.
How is the loot distribution done in your guild, Gev? People can still need, but not allowed to use? or disenchanted and distributed later?
@ Azzur
As there was no raid so far, therefore we cann't tell anything about raid spot priority at all. Also we use ingame calendar (more just as a note) which deletes any signup after day of raid so there are no notes about who was trying to attend and who wasn't.
@Gevlon
Good post I agree. One thing come to my mind. Did you put advertisement on oficial forums ? Maybe it's not a good idea, maybe we can get some people. Just think about it.
Tazar from Undergeared
@last anonymous: you make ONE appointment with the doctor. It's also possible within the "casual raiding" to request people to sign up to a particular raid 2 days before and punish them if they show up.
However HC guilds demand you to be present on 75+% on ALL raids. It's like you visit your doctor every week twice, even if you are not ill at all.
@Geen lepel: I assume you talk about epic loot. Standard "need before greed" lootsystem. So the system rolls it for you, like the LFD. I cannot care less about epics, so I won't waste time distributing them.
Question - In which time zone do you live in (since 18:30-20:00 at your place might be 20:00 - 21:30 somewhere else).
just wondering
Paris time, but I can also give you a more general answer: people mention their server time. So if guild X raids on server Y, you go server Y, create a lvl1 and see the time yourself.
Ny guilds are generally either HC during the months/years my schedule allows, or social during times, like now, when I can't, or don't want to, commit to a HC raid schedule. Does that mean I don't raid? No. Does it mean that I PuG raid with random scrubs? No.
The name "friends list" is misleading. It should be called "people who don't suck to raid with list." The idea of overstocking a guild with casual non suck raiders is great, but there's little incentive unless you legitimately have other raid leaders. It sounds like your undergeared guild isn't doing things on it's own. I've not seen a post that says "yesterday when I Couldn't play the guild when and did 10 EoE" or something along those lines. This is your project and without you the guild is just a tag. There is little reason to NEED a guild.
I think this is the reason most servers don't have a guild like that. Those of us who raid casually often do it together through friends lists. I talk to my list, they talk to theirs and we get a generally competent 10 or 25 together. Is it 100% successful? Of course not. Do we end up with M&S? On occasion. Do we do current content? Yep.
I also absolutely agree with casual guild HC core comment. They don't HAVE to be tanks and healers, but it helps. Every successful guild, every successful enterprise for that matter, has a person or people who want to see it succeed and put in the time and effort to make it succeed.
The problem is aggravated due to the fact that anyone wanting to play in blue gear is by definition not a casual.
Offer further gold and items to recruits perhaps? :P
Newton pretty much described how my old vannilla WoW guild got into raiding. A veteran raider form one of the HC raiding guilds on teh server decided to leave his guild and join our casual guild. This gave us the leadership and experience needed to take a serious crack at Molten Core. We actually did really well and were clearing MC and most of Blackwing Lair withing a few months. 40 man raiding required a lot of organization though, especially for a casula guild so we implemented a raid calender with signups and a DKP system. It worked fairly well for a while but then the gap between the 'progression' players and the 'casual' players got too big and the guild got segmented into factions. The raid leadership wanted to progress to harder content while the casual 'old guard' got bored with the progression raiding and wanted to try 'heretical' stuff like raiding with new alts and generally taking it easy until the expansion next month. When Burning Crusade came out, the guild imploded.:(
A casual guild can do raids successfully if it has good players but has the problem that the more serious players might want to go hardcore and the more casual players might simply not care enough about raiding to put in the attendance required to keep a raiding team coherant.
"Like you said, casual raiding doesn't really exist."
Gevlon specified that *successful* casual raiding requires at least some manner of HC players at the core of the group. Which I agree with. You can raid casually, you just don't get far.
We ran a casual guild for some time (personal friends who started playing WOW together, and friends we made as we played). We raided, but our progression was almost non-existent, because we did not have any rules other than we would take whoever was on, or not raid if not enough people were on. We never got far progression-wise. We had fun, but as Gevlon said, it was mostly from the chat, which we could have done while standing around in Orgrimmar.
Any progress we made (clearing Kara, starting ZA, this was during BC obviously) was due to a group of about five of us who made it to almost every raid. Two had a tank, two of us had healers. Again as Gevlon said, we had a reliable core of people who played critical raid roles.
Even so, because we were very casual and had very lax rules, we didn't progress much. We did raid casually, we just didn't have success (as measured by progression).
Thanks Gevlon, for defining "casual" once and for all!
I fit exactly in your definition of casual, maybe that's why I have so much trouble with attendance in my so called "casual" raiding guild.
I'm bookmarking this post.
Man, I hope you get enough people online for Naxx soon. If I played in the EU, I'd join your guild.
Oh man, this proyect is destinated to fail, not because it can't be done, but because the "casual" policy.
Why is it going to fail? Because you really need people to KNOW their role in the fight, specially in ICC (you can get away in Naxxramas... maybe). So if you don't have a solid group of people that will know their role in the fight, you will be doomed.
And why is knowledge of the fight such a big trouble in ICC? Because the raid is far too long and most people won't come to experience the fights.
On my experience there are only 2 succesfully run PuGs (which are the only "true" raid runs, since they happen at whatever time you want to raid and you can leave at whatever time you want without any consequence): ToC and Naxx. The later is because it's so easy with the current level of gear in the game that people just can bruteforce their way trough. The former is because it's very short so if I have a two hours a week raid schedule I can reasonably experience all the instance.
So my dear Gevlon, unless you want to abort this nonsense proyect you only have two choices: 1) Get rid of the "non-hardcore" policy, 2) Get rid of the blue gear policy so you can clear content trough the use of pure brute force! (Hey after all that's what's taking some PuGs as far as the Crimson Halls in ICC! Lots of people with 3/4 264 ilv gear!).
So unless you get rid of the casual policy of your guild is going to be a complete failure, you won't even clear Ulduar! The only instances you will clear will be Naxxramas, Sartharion and ToC (perhaps Malygos but only if you get a good pool of people that already know the fight).
The goblin solution to your problem: Pay someone to organize raids and pay players for raid attendance.
With that you will get a sizeable core group, and some direction to your proyect. Players and hired people will be happy to get a good amount of gold they can transfer to their main characters.
A big guild has a lot of members. When you have 200 people with the raiders rank(still not much, but ok) it might be a solution to put them into zones. When you get into raiding you get a rank called zone 1, zone 2, etc.
First 50 players go to zone 1. Next 50 go to zone 2. And so on. Raids are built first in their own zone, and people from out of their zone if needed. This way people will still know each other.
So they raid with much people they know from their own zone. And the guild is still big enough to fill up the holes.
Casual raids never work for the exact reasons you are just starting to find out.
If you don't enforce attendance, one of 3 things happen:
1. Exactly the right number of people turn up. Yay!
2. Not enough people turn up, and you have to cancel the raid. After a week or 2 of this, your better players will start leaving, leaving you after a while with nothing but M+S players.
3. Too many people turn up, and you have to leave some out. You can decide who to leave out by whatever method you choose, but most people choose to leave out their worst players, knowing that a) they are less likely to get a better offer elsewhere and b) if they left the guild, it wouldn't be such a big setback.
Do #2 for any extended period of time, and your guild will eventually fall apart due to a lack of players skilled enough to beat the content.
Do #3 for long enough, and you might be lucky enough to end up with a group of skilled, committed players. But your roster will be smaller and you will have to have some sort of attendance requirement to avoid have #2 starting all over again. At this point you have ceased to be a casual guild and become a hard core guild.
The entire notion of a "casual raiding guild" is ridiculous. You can't organise a team sport that requires 25 people to be present in the same place at the same time without having some sort of attendance requirement.
I wouldn't really consider 'recruiting more dudes' to be overbooking. It's pretty stressful when everyone is relying on you to put things together and you're at the mercy of people who may or may not show up on a whim. It's natural to seek ways to alleviate stress from yourself.
If you, as guild and raid leader, say we raid "X, Y, and Z days at N-M times" and someone consistently doesn't make it and hasn't communicated why, I'm going to recruit another player to take their place rather than having the burden of filling their spot every week. I might not boot them, they're welcome to stay in a friends and family rank and do older content.
There are different kinds of "casual". It's unfortunate that casual seems to have a connotation of "bad", but the two concepts aren't exclusive. As you said, people can be "hardcore" and still be bad.
There is casual "bad, crap dps, dies to stupid". There is also casual "doesn't play much" and "doesn't take things seriously" and "relaxed".
There are negative connotations towards hardcore, too. Things like hardcore players "have no life" or "are obsessed" or "take things too seriously" or "nerdrage over vent about whelps, left side, deal with it!"
I've had a raider tell me she doesn't read patch notes or know how to play her class because that'd make her 'hardcore' and she doesn't want to be. (She's benched atm.)
My raiding group is casual in the 'relaxed' 'not taking everything seriously' way. We laugh and have a good time. I realize wow is what people do for fun, they don't need to be yelled at or treated like crap to see content. At the same time, we're hardcore in that we have designated raid days, we don't stand in the stupid, we don't emoquit if we wipe once, we do kill bosses and loot epics. I'm even looking at setting up a performance based loot system (meritocracy).
Try using a term like "casualcore" (which is what my group describes ourselves as) or "casual not bad", or "casual raiding schedule".
Cheers!
Gevlon,
It seems that you're missing one of the fundamental motivators for why people play "virtual games" (broadly construed) of any sort - for the opportunity to continually advance their avatar.
The problem with the blues-geared world you've constructed is that there is little motivation or opportunity for avatar advancement. You've already stated that it's blues-only for gear; so why log on and play the character at all.
It would seem the only reason to log on and "advance" at all is specifically for the purpose of completing the blues-based "achievement" concept you've set forth.
While that probably IS a viable avatar-advancing motivator for some, it still represents the ONLY reason to actually log on that character. Which means that it's unlikely most people will log on just to be around; the only reason they would log on is because they bookmarked their calendar for a scheduled raid, which ironically is exactly what you're trying to have them NOT do so that they're not "hard core".
So it would seem you may be at an impasse here. You're not allowed to advance your character except by attending specific blue-raids, yet you don't want people to live by the raiding calendar schedule. Ergo, the only logical conclusion is to not log in very much, and/or spend your time on your other servers/characters instead.
I am an outsider! So I do not have in game details.
A setup like Stars & Gifu (Al Akir) seems a solution.
1. A commonality that stimulates being in the guild (world first/fast progress, playing with people speaking the same language, clearing content under-geared, good atmosphere).
2. Several raid teams, judged on criteria (can be raid performance, availability, gear), with intergroup promotions.
3. Reduced variability in the player base of the raidgroups.
As someone pointed out there's one problem with "heavy overbooking", and that's same as heavy overbooking in cheap airlines.
Sometimes someone is left out without a spot he wanted.
Being left out based not on "because you suck" but on "no spots left" feels as a punishment. In typical raiding the problem is the person will QQ he lost his chance to win some loot.
Even in blue raiding, people still need to come to raids to learn, practise, and especially because difficulty is raised, people probably need to learn special tactics you use to win.
And PUGs made people accept many conventions exactly because raiding is more that just "do your job". Especially if the job can be done in many ways but you only succeed if everyone is following the same way.
One note on the Casual/fail guild thing, and a story that is hopefully amusing. There is a guild on the server I am on (feathermoon US) called wind of hope, they exemplify casual friendly guild, but there are some in their upper reaches that want to raid, unfortunately their attendance is so poor they are, I believe still wiping in ULD, normal modes. To combat this they now offer to anyone with perfect attendance each month the chance to win a raffle for an engineering bike. Its the kind of carrot Ideal for only the insane. I know this hardly relates to the discussion of casual guilds, but i hope it brings amusement to others to read this
Welcome to raid leadership hell. I was a RL for a year or so and recently gave it up. Its a ton of work, sometimes rewarding, mostly not (to me). The hardest part was getting 10 people to show up on time.
I also agree that there are no casual raiding guilds. There are casual guilds who fail at raiding, and there are raiding guilds who succeed and thus are not casual. For success you need rules and a common vision. This last is so critical you might as well give up if you dont have 10 people who share the same vision. You think it would be easy; do you want to kill stuff and get their loot. No, not so much. The personalities all have to match, the raid team must commit to doing raids whenever they are posted, everyone has to show up, everyone has to agree on loot systems.
I've been through 5 raiding guilds now in my very long WoW career. I've had the gammut of the very serious server first guild to the casual fail guild, and everything in between.
My take is that something worth doing is going to be done right. You need to start off with a focus core who cares 100% about your goals, in this case raiding in blues. This core is absolutely going to carry you. You need to agree on times and raid rules. Enforce those rules too harshly and people will get disillusions. Stop raiding and people will leave. It's extremely tricky.
These are my guilds, brief description, and why they ultimately failed.
1) Social guild, doing Kara back when it was hard. Completely failed, had no priority, no vision, and no dedicated raid times. Raids would last 5 hours or more, starting at 10pm at night, and they would go every day of the week. The RL would go AFK for 15-30 min at a time between pulls. I was young, didn't know how fail this was.
2) Uber successful hardcore guild. This was a great guild, we went from kara to downing illidan in the space of 5 months. Eventually we beat the game and people gave up. Wrath came and nobody really had the focus for it any more, since naxx was so easy and no challenge was on the horizon. This guild failed because we beat the game.
3) Guild I was a RL in. Guild failed due to people not really caring. I would schedule raids and half the people woudl show up, and the other half refused to PUG. Result, we never raided. We had so many rules and policies and stuff, eventually we got very strict like hardcore guilds to try and get the new content done, but the raiders just didn't have the skill, attitude, or attention span to get it done. Guild failed due to apathy and politics.
4) Small daytime raid guild. This was/is a great group but people come and go, like they tend to do, and recruiting for this unique niche is hard. Eventually the GL left and we moved to guild #5.
5) BIG night raiding guild, doing ICC25. This guild failed/will fail due to the loot system, which basically only officers will ever get a shot at loot, and the multitide of stupid rules/policies/regulations which are insulting to serious raiders. The guild had zero cohesion, nobody knew each other, and nobody did anything as a group outside the raid. Also raiding 4-5 times a week ICC25 is doomed to fail since nobody could get loot except the top 5 people. Once people stop getting loot there is a huge disincentive to stop raiding.
Anyway hope this helps, sorry for the length.
I know no one reads old posts (and anything other than the first 1-3 posts is 'old'), but have to comment on this. Casual raiding suffers such disadvantages because of how the game is designed. Until it gets deleted from the WoW forums during forum maintenance, this thread explains how you would create a game where casual raiding was possible, and you could associate with a group of friends while still attempting challenging content.
On some servers, it is impossible to do naxx due to the server lag. Take Garona-US for instance. Nobody does Naxx anymore due to the lag.
For instance, the dance boss, nobody can ever tell when the acid comes out of the ground because of the following:
1. acid doesnt show until after you die (server lag).
So when its rare that people do naxx ,they skip that boss because Blizz makes it impossible to do. (refuses to fix server lag).
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