Are Casual Guilds Struggling?
Posted by 
iTZKooPA on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - 37 Comments Tags: Instances, PvE, casual guilds, eye of eternity, heroic, naxxramas, projectlore society, raiding
iTZKooPA on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - 37 Comments Tags: Instances, PvE, casual guilds, eye of eternity, heroic, naxxramas, projectlore society, raiding  Seen this kind of image? Then you aren't casual -via ElitistJerks |
Recruiting issues promoted me to write the latest in the line of DPS guides. By the end of the day, the guild's officers and GM had tossed in their towels and canceled raiding for the foreseeable future. For most of us the news wasn't exactly shocking. Over the past few weeks the mighty force in Naxxramas known as the Warriors of Faith had degraded into Warriors of Whenitseemsnecessary. Sign-ups remained incomplete, those that did lend their John Hancock were no where to be found for invites, and players began disappearing earlier in the night than normal.
It isn't that the guild is dead, far from it. The former trio of raid leaders simply got fed up with all the extra work they were putting into the guild, with little to show for it besides stress. After all their recruiting, hand holding and calming efforts, raids failed to materialize. Rather than continue their struggles, they have put the pressure on the rest of the guild to step up and form raids ourselves. The irony is that this is exactly what many of the newer members were doing rather than joining the guild runs.
I think that the current raids have harmed casual guilds. Being a group of older players, our time is often limited by other obligations (family, friends, work, this blog). This in turn means that many of us have unexpected things come up fairly often, causing us to miss invites, sign-ups or raids altogether. Who cares when you can PUG all of the available instances? My point is this, since you don't need a guild to get through the content, most players feel less inclined to actually support their guilds. This is especially the case if they have no other reason, like long standing friendships, to guilt trip them.
At first, I simply thought that it was just our little guild that was having issues. But if my other WoW playing comrades are anything to go by, that isn't the case. According to them, their guilds are also struggling to get guild runs together. Their plight is for the same reason, many members are running PUGs on their own time. Hopefully, most of you will read this post through before commenting, because here's the kicker. It isn't a big deal. Yea, there are some hiccups to scare out, but casual guilds won't be going anywhere, ever. The early raid content has shaken things up a bit, but as Wrath of the Lich King matures and Blizzard ramps up the difficulty - we are looking at you, Ulduar - the guilds, all guilds, will collapse back into themselves.
It's just interesting to see how fleeting these online relationships can be. One minute you are joking about this druid's mom or laughing about how the RL proposed that all Gnomes are drunkards IRL. Then a freeze on raid leader lead raids is handed down, and boom, a fistful of long standing members gquit. It's fine that they are leaving to pursue what they want from the game, but I have never been one to guild hop. How are the more casual, small scale guilds doing for the greater ProjectLore Society? Possibly more importantly, how goes those Heroic Naxx/Malygos PUGs? I have been somewhat successful in my PUG attempts, still haven't managed to take on the Eye though.
Reader Comments (37)
Is there something wrong with your itunes RRS feed? Your new episodes dont seem to be showing up
my guild has the same problem, people dont care about signing up or showing up for raids, it has lead to some major issues that we are trying to solve right now.
good luck with yours
I find my casual guild do runs that don't work with my schedule so I think they have trouble getting a run going.
I wish there was a better method to find the right guild.
Like having filters to find a guild in game.
Example:
This guilds focus is PvP or PvE or social
We play 8-12 server time (PST)
We raid Tue, Thur & Sat
We need warrior's & priest's
I'm in a small guild with some IRL friends, and it's pretty much just for chatting. No guild raids as you can just pug almost anything.
Being in a casual guild myself I find that there is a lot less stress in everything I do. Even when I am asked to help run someone through an old school instance. But the upside to a causual guild is that if there are people your level that are not too busy you start a group quite quickly.
I have been trying to put together a raiding guild for some time, and just as expected, nobody stays in for long. Koopa, I am hoping you will be right as far as Ulduar pulling guilds back together, but for the foreseeable future, it looks like PUGs are going to be the only way for people to raid unfortunately. I happen to hate PUGs with a passion and would prefer all guild runs of even Heroics.
My guild is having pretty much the same problem ... They started running Naxx 10 and I believe they finished it but pretty hard... with raids scheduled like a week before with confirms and over confirms. And ofc we're lacking what every guild is lacking - healers :)
I'm the GM of an extremely laid back guild. We have 200+ members from lvls 1-80 and do 10 man raids. I haven't had anybody Gquit in 6 months =D
Yeah, we have the same problem. Of course, there are only three people in our guild... maybe that is the problem...
My guild is so laid back that nobody is above level 60. We've got a 60, two 58s, and a bunch of lower levels. It's not all alts either...just people who play when they feel like it and play for fun.
Yeah its not really a big deal. We decided that it wasn't worth the hours of work a week just to cancell it when people who had signed up / said they would be there weren't.
The healer shortage was what was really killing us.
I'm co-guild leader of my guild, and while we're all a little lower level, we are trying to get into raiding. We have fun and that's all that matters to me really. The only problem we have is people leaving half way through. :(
Our guild is coming across the same problem, just simply not enough people. We even have to team up with another guild to run 25mans, which is fine because they play the "parent guild" and run most of the details. But recently we haven't even gotten enough people between our TWO guilds to get things going.
A lot of people have resorted to PUGs. I can't really blame them. I'm with those people who miss the occasional raid. Being a full time student holding a 4.0 is extreamly time consuming, not to mention keeping up with my various blogs (go PL ^_^)
Its tough, but you try to fit in what you can and hope for the best...I still wish our guild would give EoE a try.
I found my guild by randomly getting tossed in the 5th spot of an Occulus group with 4 current members. I hopped on Vent with them, found them to be really cool guys, and joined up.
The point is, I like the people I'm playing with, so I make time for our raids, even if they're later in the week and I know I can get in on a PUG as soon as Naxx unlocks on Tuesdays. The best motivation for any person staying with a guild and participating in guild activities is friendly people. These are the kind of people that will keep joking through multiple wipes and can keep things light all the way from Anub'Rekhan to KT.
People first. Everything else falls into place.
One of the things my guild has done is made a commitment to carrying on with scheduled runs even if it means PUGing some empty slots. This system rewards the players who commit and live up to their commitments, and shows those who aren't able to show up that their absence won't hold the guild back. It eases stress for all parties by making it so progression isn't held hostage to flaky schedules and emergencies.
I'm GM of my guild and this blog raised an eyebrow for me. I've got a small guild, maybe 30 people and their alts, and I'm the only lvl 80. I run VoA whenever possible, but other than that, most of my time is spent helping my friends. Most of my money goes to lend a little help when a guildie just can't wait to make that extra gold for their flyer, etc. We all get along very well and I'm anxiously awaiting those lvl 80 achievements so my friends and I can kick some butt! It is difficult to recruit any higher levels to my guild though. They see the few lower levels and run screaming for the hills. Sad really, because they're missing out on a great guild experience.
While I am not the GM of our guild I am the RL. While this can be a slight issue with our guild, people running pug's outside of the guild, it doesn't bother us for the most part. And why is that? Because eventually, they will see that what happens when you pug (at least on our server where horde pop is very low) is the next day, you don't get back in or they don't run it again or they found guild mates that wanted to go. Then when the time comes that we are getting a 10 man going and they are already saved, too bad, we just did a full clear. How's that spider/plague quarter run goin for ya? Oh that's right, you aren't going any further... On top of that, if people pug and people complain about not having a raid going we make it abundantly clear if we didn't have the right people online to get something started that if people didn't pug we could get this done, but oh well maybe next week.
However the one thing that gets me frustrated is when we are going to run a 10 man naxx (which we typically do every week just because) and so and so who just recently joined the guild or is a pug'er says "we need some more heals for naxx anyone wanna go?" it pisses me off to no end because now they are trying to fill their crap pug with people that usually go on our guild groups and occasionally a couple people go and when we get groups together and start sending out invites we get "oh I'm saved already" or "dang it I'm saved already." After a while, the people that do want to go regularly will figure out that they will go with the guild and get stuff done or just get a few things done with a pug.
Really what seems to plague our guild and, in a larger perspective, our server, are guild hoppers and people that just want to loot and split saying "I don't really like how you guys run things, I don't think I'm a good fit," but what they really mean is "I think I'll go to this higher level raiding guild now that I have my T7 and epics."
Right now i'm in a sort of laid back guild.. we have cleared 10 man naxx many times and attempted 25 man but never found the time to finish it. Our real leader is a nice and funny guy, but it seems he doesn't like to lead. I joined right after wortlk came out, when there were only 6 members in the guild. Ive been in it up to this point, and still am the lowest raiding level which gets me mad.. i even do the most dps in the guild (this shows that we are laid back because my dps is 3.3k). I never have been a leader in wow... failing many tanking tries when respeccing. So when i see that this week we're only doing a 10 man i ask my guild leader why we aren't doing 25 man. He says that it usually fails, even though we've cleared 3 wings on 25 man in one night. (the continuation failed because not enough people showed up the next night). This discourages me because i feel that the time i put into the game isnt worth the runs our guild does. But i recently ran an extremely succesful fast 25 man partial guild run. Everything seemed robotic and there was no sense of humour. It was like running with a group of wanna be "pro wow players". On the fights that you have sole responsiblities to keep yourself alive such as heigan and thaddius the raid leader would tell us that if we died on that fight we would not be able to get any loot. So i decided that my laid back not extremely but pretty succesful guild was the guild to stay with.
I have just left a guild, which was in 2 words an epic fail. The guild master left and promoted someone who clearly had no idea what he was doing.
Now i am in a new guild, , and its much more fun , we do raid naxx etc, but we also have raids on horde towns, plus classic instances, just for nostalgia. And within casual guilds, you can go about your daily wow duties, be it questing, pvp-ing , which is alot less stressful. If you are invited to a raid, and you accept, your there, if decline, no worries your doing other things. Casual guilds, are the way to go. I am not a fan off trade chat invites..such as " only level 80s please" i like the fact in this guild, we have all levels all classes, so we can advise on best armor for the class, best profs, and boost. It makes the game more fun. And the chat is always friendly and helpful.
I'm the Guild Healer and an officer in my guild. It's a family-run, and so that pretty much equates to laid-back (no offense meant in any way). That suited me just fine during the waning days of TBC since I only did a heroic 3 times during the entire expansion. But I was determined to not be left out in WotLK, so I leveled my main and hunter to 80 a.s.a.p. and began pugging the heroics (I was the only 80 for quite awhile). That was back in December, and it is only now that the rest of my guild seems to be catching up a little. I still have to pug heroics and raids, which -- because of the hassle and drama involved -- irritates me. The announcement of patch 3.1 has served only to exacerbate that because I'm afraid that I'll never be able to progress enough to get to Ulduar. (FYI: my guild never got beyond Karazhan. That says something.)
Don't get me wrong, my guild has good-natured people in it. I just want to do guild heroics and raids instead of having to pug.
SSC and TK hurt my guild more than naxx has. We suffered a lot of departures because the content was so Difficult and we had many undergeared players, so we weren't able to make progress at a rate people were patient enough with. So a number of our better players abandoned us, and hit up other "more advanced" guilds. We lost a lot of players because of that, and some finer points of the early fights which proved confusing and problematic (such as the healers adjusting to Lurker, and people in general dodging spout).
So yes on the one hand having content so easy people just pug everything is bad, but on the other having it so insanely difficult that nobody wants to stick it through is just as bad.
I completely empathize with the raid leaders who just got fed up with it all, I've been a senior officer and a raid leader in my guild for ages, and in all honesty the amount of headaches are almost not worth the struggle for epic gear. There's so much drama, handholding, immature and selfish behavior, and lack of respect at times it's very disappointing and distressing
Not only do we have to figure out how to do the fights, we have to nurse people's different issues, farm ourselves sick getting mats and stress out over the different boss fights. It's really aggrivating and I'm glad it's somewhat less of a headache thanks to the "so called" nerfed difficulty (which I mainly attribute to the many publicly known strategies well in advance of the instance re-opening)
I can't imagine leaving my guild. I've been in it for more then a year and a half and I really enjoy talking with all my guildies. Also, our guild isn't struggling at all; our 25 man team is as active as ever on their alts and as you said, those alts can do PUGs, and the less-geared people in my guild can also do PUGs or ask for help in Naxx10 on our Naxx25 geared mains.
However, I do think it has put more stress on casual guilds. Its now so easy to get to level 80 and get raiding that the quality of people is starting to deteriorate; imagine that someone was leveling all through BC and didn't get to experience any content. Then they got WotLK and sped quickly through the massively-nerfed Outland and rushed into Northrend and hit 80 with virtually no raiding experience at all. These players are the definition of casual, and yet they can do the raids that hardcore guilds still do. Blizzard is trying to merge hardcore and casual together, while there should probably be an imbalance anyway, and its hurting both casuals and hardcore. Hardcore players are bored and casuals are pissed at all the newer players.
I can barely find enough time to even play a little here and there with my RL friends in my guild. I would definitely not be able to keep up with demands of the hardcore guilds out there. It sounds like they have a ton of fun, but I wouldn't be able to contribute. I guess we all go through busy and not-so-busy points in our lives. I'm looking forward to the next lull so I can get lots of WoW in :)
At one point I was in the top progression guild on the server with many world firsts. However I started college and now most my focus is obviously towards that. I've noticed that most content is easily pug'able (vaults/OS/naxx) Naxx 25 / Maly 25 isn't as simple. Maly 10 isn't that hard but the pug needs a standard of gear and a clear understanding of how that boss is engaged. (especially phase 3.)
I'm truly looking forward to new content and a guild which will have fun and not only focus on progression and guild position on content. I rarely run Naxx 10 anymore unless it's to help the guild or a friend in need of an extra heals.