Our current challenge is reliability – attendance and performance. We’ve been here before back in BC where we had a group that was more hardcore and a group of raiders that were more casual or less committed. We solved it by focusing them into a more casual and a more hard core group accordingly. It dissolved the issue of more serious raiders becoming frustrated when the raiders that were less serious didn’t show up, showed up unprepared strategy or gear wise, or held the raid’s progression back in some other way like goofing around. The inverse was true, the more casual players didn’t want the burden of having to show up when they said they would and often told the more serious raiders to chill out.
Like then, we will return to herding the more serious raiders into a more demanding raid group and the more casual raiders into a casual raid group. Nothing new with that solution.
What is new is the small army of new officer faces that are going to be helping us accomplish this objective. In the past, we have relied on seasoned guild veterans. Today, we promoted four new officers whom are relative newcomers to the guild however embody our objectives very well. We have demoted veteran guild officers that have let their accounts lapse or have been afk too long. Not out of malice, simply in order to maintain true to our establishment that officer ranks in this guild are working ranks and you earn them by showing up reliably to do the work that needs doing.
As we grow, we will add more officers as we see necessary – ideally, we would like to see sufficient officers to make sure that rank has a constant presence online during core hours and certainly to make sure that vacations of 2-3 officers do not cause raiding to come to a temporary halt.
Recruiting is it’s own finicky thing right now – hard to recruit solid, reliable raiders if you are not doing 25man content. Chicken and egg issue. How to get 25 raiders reliably to have a 25man raid to attract new raiders?! Our strategy at this time is to continue reliably running our 25man raid each week and over time replace the number of pugs in it with guildies. We are targeting having 2 more serious raid groups and one more casual group (10 mans) and thus the 25 man would reliably be comprised of 20 more serious raiders and 5 more casuals that reliably show up, are ready, and can perform reliably.
This should give our raiding the shot in the arm it needs. Too long we’ve been mixing serious with casual again – heavily because we like raiding with each other and many are either serious or casual. Time to let the serious go after Kingslayer and the rest just have fun.
