Guidance on the road ahead, and on Recruiting

Everyone knows we are in a transition period – both as a game overall with the expansion coming out and within our guild as we re-tool. The same questions are starting to come up and rather than risk giving slightly different answers each time, we will continue to use the website as ‘the place to get the authoritative answer.’ However, that is complicated by the website being about 3 weeks behind current changes – so bear with it and you will see it updated in the coming 14 days (most likely almost daily).

During the road ahead, the best guidance was provided a long time ago by Douglas Adams:

“Don’t Panic.”

No, really. You are encouraged to talk with the officers and guild leader anytime you have concerns or worries – whether about the upcoming expansion or about our guild. Ask away. You are going to get some honest answers.

To build on Adams’ advice, with all the changes ahead, simply communicate, stay informed (*cough* read the website often *cough*) and know that there always seems to be a plan behind the scenes that works out for you (you didn’t think the Primals market, or Mageweave, or leather markets just coincedentally are where we want them to be when we are either selling or buying, did you?).

We are slowly recruiting and we have indeed closed the ‘open recruitment’. You’ll find that I am spending about 30 mins – 1 hour talking to potential candidates before I extend them a guild invite. I suggest you do the same. We experienced tremendous turmoil and people coming and going when it was an open door recruitment approach. Returning to the prior closed recruitment where only officers could invite into the guild, we are not attempting to stymy your recruitment - simply encourage you to genuinely confirm that the person you are recommending is genuinely someone we have a reason to believe will be a good addition to the guild. In order to have a reason, by default we need to have a conversation.

Very quickly, we will have new ranks (yes – I know! the first were both a test of a potential rank structure and a test to see how we all react to it) and one of them is ’social’. The social rank has no pressures to raid although they can certainly step in if needed. There will also be a ‘casual raider’ and a ‘hardcore raider’ rank to keep the two mostly apart. This will help limit the hardcore putting too much pressure on casual raiders to be online more often or gear more quickly and will prevent the casual raiders from holding the hardcore raiders back.

Sounds like we need to add a lot of people back - why did we close the open recruitment?

Because the people we are inviting now, are people we actually want to raid with or socialize with. And it’s not everyone on the server. There is going to be a strong push to level 80 in the expansion and some of our guild will be there amongst the first ones to ding 80 – others will lag behind them. In that crowd of level 80s that got there first, there are going to be some great friends and players, and there are going to be some asshats — ok, there are likely going to be a lot of asshats!

We do not have the slightest interest in recruiting the asshats. By all means, as you are leveling and once you get to 80 and start doing level 80 groups/raids, recruit the ‘worthy’ ones that fit our guild well. But do not just blanket recruit 80s hoping to ‘get enough to have a large pool of raiders’. It has once again proven to not work. They cause more dysfunction than good and the raid group starts to cycle too many people which actually holds the raid groups back.

Are we going to have problems with progression if we don’t have everyone on the server in our guild? No. LK is all about enabling smaller guilds to raid all the way to the end without needing to put together a 25-man. Are we going to do 25-mans, though? Yes. Hells, we are still wanting to do BC content we left unfinished and even original WoW instances.

When will there be more people online like there used to be? Never again. Huh? ‘Like there used to be’. We do not aim to have a collection of awesome people AND asshats all online in our guild. We are hopefully avoiding most of the asshats and just having a lot of awesome people online every night. Casual players will not be on every night, however with enough re-recruiting of awesome people, we will have plenty of people online to quest, instance, pvp or raid with. Give it a few weeks.

Speaking of what to do with all your time… (not that we were, but we were), do you really want to get to NE (Northrend) and have to go back somewhere to level your fishing or cooking? I recommend you go do that now. Level your professions up at least to 350 which is where LK picks up (so no, you do not need to get Blacksmithing to 375, you can start up in LK at 350). Gather up some gold. If there is anything you need to do in the Outlands, start telling us so that we can plan a day or two ahead to help you. Think about it – if your hearth is in NE and you zone back to SW (I am predicting SW will get a new influx of bank alts from IF) in Old World, are you really going to want to go back to Nethergarde Keep to get to Portal to fly to wherever to do whatever? Forget it! Do it now!

Btw – all that talk about gear not being worth anything later on in LK – sure, but it will sure as hell help in the first few levels of questing – so don’t stop gathering! And if you have been really thinking ahead, you have been looking through the beta info and wowhead’s info and found that Badges of Justice just became obsolete: replaced with Emblems. So don’t be banking those either!

So in short: “Don’t Panic!” Stay in touch, communicate with everyone in our guild. Help find and recruit solid additions to our guild – which is to say people we want to be friends with and want to raid with.

Then just let the rest unfold.

I’m looking forward to getting back to a guild _full_ of people (yes lots of them online every night) that actually like helping each other and respond to calls for help instead of a lot of what we had over the past 9 months.

Btw, some folks need Arcatraz tomorrow night (Wed Oct 1) – log on and see if you can help.