The guild of which I’m GM – we have kara on farm but have only taken down the first boss in ZA – is based more on having fun together than reaching unreachable heights.

We’ve seen people leave ofc to go to raiding guilds, but we’ve had a fair few of those return cos they didn’t like it.

Look at it like the employment market – sometimes a company offers internships or traineeships, where they’ll take someone on based on their potential and help them grow into a valuable asset; other times, they recruit for a skilled and experienced employee because they need them to perform right now.

Wrath is close enough that any guilds who are recruiting now are madly trying to get content done before it hits – they can’t afford to wait for someone to gear up. Post-expansion release, things may well be different.

Basically, it’s because they require skill level _and_ attendance. If they have a raid spot to fill, they need them to be a great player as well as a readily-available one. If they’re raiding three nights a week, they need that raider to be available as often as possible – they don’t want to have to recruit three shammies who can only come one night a week.

Part of success is consistency; when learning a new boss, there’s nothing more frustrating than coming in for a second night at it, only to have half a dozen different people in the team who weren’t there last night – it makes it very hard to capitalize on past progress because the new people now have to spend all that time learning what you learnt last night.

Wht it boils down to is that they require skill _and_ availability, and they have to use one of them as a criterion first. If they used skill as the first criterion they’d wind up trialling many, many more raiders who they’d ultimately have to say no to anyway, when it became clear they couldn’t meet the availability requirements.

Speaking as a guild leader and raid organiser, I’d _far_ rather have a 90% player who’s available all the time than a 100% player who can only raid once a week.

I guess my perfect guild would be a combo of 15-20 scheduled hours a week, and all of the above!

I tend to believe the europeans are just naturally more skilled & mature too, and that’s why they’re always ahead of the US in progression. Look at the kind of gear they used to get some world firsts – its laughably low level and therefore pretty amazing.

Yes, it did take us awhile to really get it going. I do agree that it will be different this time around. I think we do have a pretty strong core of people that we didn’t have right out of the gate last time. Hopefully more Bandits will look to sign up now that things are changing a bit in the alliance. I personally try to talk to people and convince them to give it a try whenever I can. I know we have even MORE solid people that could really contribute.

Oddly enough, the alliance values are starting to shift towards valuing skill over gear. Bandits in particular have a rep for being players that have done their homework and know how to play whatever toon they bring to the table. PTD, Zhenkhal, KelriK, DK… Alot of times, the leadership will juggle peope in the raid to work these guys in if they signup because they know they will be guarantees. Unfortunately we just don’t see many Bandits willing to signup for the alliance runs consistantly.

Raiding is goign to evolve. The gear difference between 10man and 25 man is not extremely significant. You’ll see a progression where folks will be pushing the 10 mans on every lockout timer they are avialble while the larger groups are able to go in and go for the min/max gearing avaialble in the 25man content. I think you’ll see our alliance stabalize and get started sooner this time arround and hopefully we can bring more bandits along.

Thanks for the great perspective! I wish more guilds would do it like yours does. Does EVERYONE have to shoot for the bleeding edge? When you make WoW like work, doesn’t performance sometimes suffer?

@Jess

Sorry Jess, I’m not even a country music fan, but I do remember that one!

“I’m goin through the Big D, and I don’t mean Dallas…”

What I fail to understand is why so many people require that kind of level of commitment. My guild, the Drunken Badgers, raids once (yes, once!) a week for five hours. We successfully made full clears of Mount Hyjal in under a month. We are currently four bosses down in Black Temple. We have a raid roster, but no mandatory attendance rate. If you don’t show up for a number of weeks (assuming you’ve let us know ahead of time), you get put into a sub status. That doesn’t mean that we won’t try to work you in when we can, though, or that you’re blackballed from the raid.

In the eyes of our contemporaries, we’re casual raiders and our progress has been nothing short of uncanny. We rely on recommendations to get initiates into the guild, but we’ll take applicants outside of the guild for the raid. Hell, most of the time we go out of the way to do a heroic five-man with a new guy just to assess his performance and mostly because we don’t want some egotistical idiot who thinks his gear to be the key to get into the raid.

The nice thing is that many of our raiders have their significant others in the raid, which helps allay the feelings of “you’re spending more time with those strangers than you are me!” spousal/significant other syndrome.

I dunno. Hardcore works for progressive raiding guilds who want to down content before anyone else, but, for me, I’ll stick with raiding with friends once a week and smashing content anyways!