Are Casual Guilds Struggling?
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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)
My guild is really laid back, but thats that I wanted. For me the guild is another way to have fun, people to talk ingame and people to help.
On my server (Terenas US) we have what is called the Small Guild Alliance. A grouping of some 30 or so less-than-300-members guilds who ally themselves together to increase bodies in raids or parties and increase access to crafters and resources. We have been together since about 2005 (the beginning basically) and have stuck together since.
Now, what I'm coming at is this: The SGA is by no means a raiding association, but we do have hard core raider guilds within the alliance. These hard corers have had to re-think their policies with the lack of bodies lately. Not that people don't want to raid anymore, they just have real life issues to take care of.
In the past, raids and instances were filled with strictly SGA member guilds. It wasn't unusual to see 3 or 4 guilds in one 40 man raid. There was no such thing as PuG'ing the remaining people we needed.
Now a days, the calls go out to the SGA chat and to regular chat to call for people to join in. Real life gets in the way far too often and the raid leaders we have realized this early on.
Does the group lose dynamic with the PuG'ed members? No.
Does this mean we will stop the raids? No.
What it means is that, until new content comes out, most raiders are looking at their different priorities in game and rl and figuring out that some things need their attention more than others. Their times to raid in the day may have changed too (see Shift Workers).
It's always hard to see a once great raid group fall apart, but game life often reflects real life.
Besides, when Ulduar opens up, we'll see all those raiders come racing back. Maybe not at the same times as the rest of us, but they'll come back.
As for guild jumpers, their loss if they can't tough it out. Hard core raiders often miss out on some of the most spectacular areas in the game by driving at only the end game instances.
im the Raidmaster of a little (ok we might not be little, but sometimes you would think so) raid guild.
we have 20-30 lvl 80 members in raid-ready gear, and still we cant get raiding -_-
ppl just dont show up for the raids, leave quickly or dont sign up at all.
good to hear that i'm not the only one with those problems
We're in the same spot: The people who have been level 80 for a few weeks, pug their Naxx raids. Which leaves the guild to pick up the ones that just hit 80 and are not geared well at all, and trying to carry them through Naxx. There are only so many people that can be carried, and for us, it generally means that the guild is unable to complete Naxx. Which means that more people join pugs for Naxx... and thus we're in a vicious circle.
Maybe I'm old school, but I've always reserved my raids for the guild. I try to stay up as late as possible for the raids, but I am one of few with this hardcore mentality.
Right now I am the guild master of a casual guild and we don't really have this problem. I think the reason for this is out raid time. Because we are an old group we find the best time for us to raid is around 5pm to 7pm. most players don't raid at those times so our guild is a good place to go for people that want to hit up a raid and then go out to a bar IRL at 8 or 9.
I think one of the other advantages is that because there are those of us with so little time we work hard to avoid waisting time. everyone knows their part and what they need to have to make things go smoothly. Engineers bring bots for repairs and selling trash, Alchemists bring elixirs and if there is an item people don't need we DE it and put it in the guild bank. I think a guilds willingness to work together to make raiding better is what keeps my guys coming back for raids.
Read the articles all over the net about Age of Conan losing over 50% of it's active players in the past few months, and the summary hinting at lack of end game content.
Blizzard is ratcheting up the difficulty of raiding to appeal to the crackhead wow players that want to raid or farm mats 5:30pm-1:00am daily, but it's putting off the casual players and guilds that may in fact make up a majority of subscribers.
Raiding in WoW has gone from tank & spank with the _occasional_ wrinkle here or there - to an endless spiral of scripted gimmicks to learn. Standing on the wrong square at the wrong time? You die. Don't have Deadly Boss Mods running to time your Mind Control re-application before it wears off? You die. Don't have poison cleansing totem or a druid to cleanse players non-stop? You probably can't even run H-AN. Blizzard put 10 man content into the game allegedly to make raiding "accessable" to small guilds, but the cheesy tricks and hoops you have to jump through aren't that drastically different than their 25 man counterparts. There is nothing "casual" about pre-raid "homework" including watching videos on Tankspot for 30 minutes + another 30 minutes of reading user comments on Wowhead and strategy guides on Wowwiki for _every single boss encounter_.
As a guild leader, I won't even go into the frustration of calendared raids that have 50% no-shows or lurkers who neither accept/decline. We've tried multiguild runs for 25s but it just introduces another clash of conflicting time schedules, personalities and play styles.
Gone are the days when you could jump in to Kharazan with 9 friends and plow through the content at an enjoyable pace. Perhaps the hardcore players enjoy Lich King raiding, but for many of us semi-casual types, the shiny has worn off and it's starting to feel like a second job.
Our guild hasn't struggled, but we're kind of on the boarder of "casual." I think most people refer to us as a "casual raiding" or "casual progressive" in that we don't have strict attendance guidelines, and we have no problem waiting (okay, we might have a little impatience) while the priest goes to tuck his kid into bed for the 4th time. But we have a group of core raiders with a few that cycle in and out, and attendance determines your ability to get invite. In the end, those of us who have been raiding with the guild for years continue to progress, and the others stick around for the companionship or move on to "greener" pastures.
That being said, there has been a HUGE disconnect in our full time, four-night-a-week raiders and our occasionals, for the same reason you're talking about. In Burning Crusade, there were many 1 or 2 nighters, usually dependent upon that particular night's instance, raid comp, and who needed what gear. Here, so far, because we're not slamming our head against the same walls week after week (anyone remember A'lar and Vash?) and we effectively now clear everything in 2 nights, those occasional raiders aren't getting spots.
So they go off and PuG and get themselves geared up, but how do you ask the mage who has been there night after night to sit out for someone who you haven't raided with in months? It's been terribly hard on our officers, and we've had many gquits because of it. You're absolutely right; when a guild is no longer needed for progression, those without ties will go seeking elsewhere.
Our guild is casual-rp but that has so many problems. We get people telling us they want to do stuff, so we organise it and then no-one shows. (ever seen a one lock shattrath warming party, it ain't pretty and led to several hours of jumping off high stuff)
Seems you can't please all of the people all of the time. Just do what you can and then if no-one cares then blame them when they complain that you do nothing.
My guild is a endgame raid guild where u need to be 18 years old to join, this and a gm with a lose /gkick finger have made ppl step up to plate and raid even tho all 25 man is on farm when u are raiding in a mature guild ppl dont want the /gkick cause that will meen that they need to go pug naxx maly or os and lets face it a maly hardly ever works forget about doing a OS +drakes and if u to do naxx 25 nu need to use all day where a guild run in naxx25 can be done in only 4hr's what i meen to say is dont take slack from anyone if the guild is a raid guild u do NO pug u bug a 25 raid u get a /gkick u slack on /sign to raids u get a /gkick siple as that
Getting OS with 3 drake and the immortal titel from naxx can only work in guild raids, this will make sure u only have the true raiders left the ones that care about the progress of the guild and the toon ofc
I've been struggling with this issue for the last few months.
I've been with my guild ever since I took my first steps in Azeroth, back in january, and when I and a couple of others who had dinged 80 decided to start preparing for raids, all seemed wonderful. It was a month ago when we realized it wasn't going anywhere. Nobody seemed to care enough to gear up in heroics, the teamspeak channel we set up was empty most of the time (except for us), only one or two had read the strategy we posted on the guild forum and we saw player after player gquit, leaving us with a couple of 80s and a whole bunch of people leveling from as low as 20s to 60s.
Some weeks latter, we, with the permission of the gm, created an alternative guild, one specifically made for raids. But, once again, the same issues kept ruining our attempts at raiding and we dissolved the new guild and went back to the old one.
Only now are we starting to raid properly, if we can even call it that! We can't even find enough people, of the 30 or something 80s raid geared members, to run a clean normal naxx raid (mails go unanswered, guild events on the calender go unconfirmed, etc.). I've found myself having to spend days and hundreds (if not thousands) of gold farming gear so I can respec into a tank, healer, or whatever the raid needs. All of this on my own too, the guild won't even realize I could use some help with the respec cost and gearing, let alone some counseling on specs, gear, etc, or, if nothing else, some motivation!
I could quit, but I know most of the people there (not just the raid people, but the leveling and even new members). I guess I'll have to start putting together pugs if I ever want to complete a naxx run : /
I am an officer in a casual raiding guild, and I read this and am going through the same things. We cannot seem to get a clean naxx run in despite the fact that we have nearly 40 80's in the guild ( not all are raid gear or speced ) The ones that were raiders ended up leaving for higher level guild and just kept knocking us back to pugging 10 man, if everyone just stayed we could be progressing nicely but we get more new members, gear up a few they leave and then we do it all over again, a few of us who have stuck it out are geared in full 10 man naxx gear and would love to try EOE or OS with drakes up but we have to gear up new people who join and want to raid and teach them all the fights just for them to get recruited by a bigger more progressive guild it is really frustrating.
My guild is having similar problems. We have 21 lvl 80s, but, when we put an event on the calendar, only like 5 people sign up - and only 2 or 3 of those 5 actually show up. I schedule events a week in advance, and I even mail letters to every person who was invited, but still more than half of the invitations go unanswered.
Because of our low attendance, I end up PuGing the rest of the raid team, which is a nuicance by itself becasue it wastes another 30 minutes. Then, once we finally get zoned it, we get nowhere. Twice it's been like this in naxx, where we've gotten together a group of some guild members and mostly random people, and we can't even defeat Anub'Rekhan. I don't think it's a gear issue; I know the guild members are geared enough for it, but I didn't check al lof the PuGed members. I'm thinking that it's an issue of people not knowing what to do, but they still fail even when I spell out what to do before the fight. We have the same attendance situation in OS, but we mange to get through that one (not without dying at least once on Sarth the first time, though).
After reading this post and the comments, I think I've come up with a solution. I'm going to have all of the members who want to raid do Naxxramas on their own. When a members thinks he/she's ready, then he/she can show me his/her gear as proof of skill, competence, and readiness for higher level content. Once we amass enough (about 12 or 13) of those members, we'll start on 10 man EoE and 10 man Sarth + drakes, and, within a few weeks from that, Ulduar.
I'd like to know what you think of my problems and my proposed solution. I've heard repeatedly that Naxxramas is incredibly easy, but the two times I've tried it, it's failed, and, unfortunately, I and my guild take the blame, for something that was probably the PuGed players' faults. However, I find myself thinking the same way, with the mentality that I should just do a random PuG and it would work out fine. Is the guild really the problem? Are PuGs a lot easier? Will telling people to gear up themselves make them mad or want to quit, or will they enjoy the freedom?