I JUST FUCKING WANT TO RAID GODAMMIT!!!!!!

Whoospie! This is one of those posts that was written in the heat of my fury but I didn’t get around to posting it back in October when this was all on fire. Things have simmered down now, read yesterday’s post for more information on what has changed. Since it was released and people have commented, I’m reposting it. Maybe someone will get something out of it… it’s already spawned a very good response post.

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Yes, this was the alternate title to my post regarding our non-visit to the Trial of the Grand Crusader.

I had a nice recruitment post ready to go. Making the push from 10s to 25s, come join us!

What follows is not a nice recruitment post.

I want to start by saying that I <3 the people in my guild very much. They are an awesome group of guys and when we get a raid going, we can usually bust some shit out.

Here’s the problem:

We are a social guild trying to pretend to be a raiding guild.

We have friends and family in the guild that we are either working around their crazy schedules or lack of skill.

Our progression team roster has 11 people on it.

Limited play time plagues several of them. This generally takes the form of being on only 1 or 2 nights a week. Why do we have someone on our progression team that can’t even commit to 1 night a week? Because he’s a friend. He’s a decent player, but isn’t able to devote enough time to the game to keep on top of things.

We have our share of afkers as well. It’s not meant to be disrespectful to the raid, I’m sure. I know they have stuff happening in real life. But would you sign up for a softball league if you knew you were going to have to walk off the field every 10 minutes?

Communication is an issue for scheduling. I’m using the in-game calendar and the calendar on the guild site. Can’t log in to WoW? Fine, do it at the guild site. Don’t like the guild site? Fine, use the in-game calendar or drop me a letter. Something. Anything. Carrier fucking pigeon if you have to.

Then we have the people that sign up and don’t show. Again, communicate as soon as possible.

We have one guy that we laugh at, he never gems or enchants his gear unless we drag him to the bank and take care of it for him. We give him flasks he never uses unless we hound him. He hasn’t even spent all of his talent points in his main spec. He plays really well, so it’s not like it’s hindering us, but it isn’t helping us either. It’s a funny inside joke, but what about when we bring in new people? If I joined a raiding guild and one of my fucking officers didn’t put forth the effort the keep his shit up to par, I would quit on the spot. But we’re a social guild so we just laugh about it.

With only 11 people on the roster (1 of which I don’t really count since he’s only on 1 night a week at most), if we’re out any 1 person we’re in a bad spot.

We have some other people in the guild that we can try to pull from to fill spots.

But the majority of them either don’t want to raid (and we obviously don’t want to force people to raid) or they want to raid but their skills aren’t on par, or they just haven’t been proven in a raiding environment.

WoW is a more of a game than just plugging in Super Mario Bros. and jumping around randomly until you’ve won. It takes time and effort if you want to do well at it. Even company-sponsored softball teams get together for batting practice once in a while, this is no different. Your guildmates can give you direction and advice, but the learning and application of that information has to come from the individual player.

We’ve got a couple people that could be in progression raiding, but the others seem to be afraid of expanding the progression list past their friends and family and a couple of us that have shown we’re not retarded.

So we end up in situations where we have 8-9 progression raiders on and a couple sub-par or unproven guildies.

No one in progression wants to take the sub-pars. We’ll do gearing runs with them, we’ll do instances with them, but progression is not the place for a healer that has his primary healing assignment as number fucking 7 on his heals list. True story. But no one, including me has the guts to tell them (really only him) that they (he) sucks. And my only reason for not being honest with him has to do with the real life friendship I have with a family member of his outside the game. It would get around to him and he might take it the wrong way.

They don’t want to take the unprovens, because they don’t know what they’re capable of… but we never take them… so we never see… mobius strip of reasoning.

But they don’t want to bring non-guilded friends or pugs to fill in the spots. It wouldn’t be fair to the guildies that we’re not taking.

So you know what happens?

No one fucking gets to raid.

We had a second raid team going for getting new people geared and trained – trying to get some skill instilled in those that wanted to raid and give an opportunity to the unprovens to strut their stuff.

The idea was to eventually push to 25s by combining the 2 groups and then picking up a couple extra people.

The second raid group had even more problems getting enough people to sign up, show up and not afk through the raid.

Not to mention, it was generally a group of 4-5 skilled people trying to make up for 5-6 bad players. The bad players were getting bored that they never got to see anything new and the skilled players were ready to kill the bad players for not demonstrating an ability to learn anything about their character or the mechanics of a fight so that they could see something new.

We lost our raid leader for that second group yesterday.

I saw it coming.

I’ll miss him. I think out of all the officers, he and I and one other share the closest vision of what the guild could be and was willing to put forth the effort for it.

I don’t blame him for leaving.

Hell, I’ve thought about following.

But as much as I want to raid, I’m trapped by my social obligations.

I have friends that I want to continue raiding with, but what if we don’t all get accepted to the same raiding guild?

I have friends that don’t want to do serious raiding, they wouldn’t even be able to apply to a serious raiding guild as a social member.

What next?

This is what I think should happen:

People that don’t sign up for raids don’t get brought.

We will pug your replacement. Yes, that’s right. Bring total strangers in place of people that don’t fucking show up.

People that sign up for raids but don’t show and don’t have a damn good reason for it or weren’t able to clear it before the raid get benched. If we have room in the next raid, we’ll take you. If not, sucks to be you.

Players with skill issues need to be told. And if I’m one of them, please tell me.

No one should be allowed to enter a raid without full enchants/gems/whatever. In progression, there is no excuse for it, everything we’re wearing should be full epics and worthy of an enchant. Gearing raids there is more flexibility – if you’re a couple badges away from upgrading a piece, we can wait for the better piece.

The progression roster needs to be expanded to at least 15 people. Life happens and we can’t expect every member of the core team to show up every single week. But it shouldn’t stop us from raiding. We should have 3-4 people capable of tanking. 4-5 people capable of healing. And a bunch of people that can DPS. Does this mean that some people won’t get to go? Yes, it fucking does. But it means that 10 people DO get to go. Selections should be made based on raid composition requirements and who actually signed up/showed up, not who is a friend or family member or who didn’t get to go last week (unless the switch is basically equal). Being on the progression roster is a privilege earned by skill

We need people to step and show some leadership. I’m organizing raids. I got people to finally agree to dates and times (not that it’s really helped). I put the events on the calendars. I hound people to sign up or decline. But I can’t be the only one. We’re lucky that in the progression raids, we’re usually taking on content that we’ve all seen or researched. We know what we’re supposed to be doing so the little discussion we have is minor tweaks and fine tuning. The gearing raids are not so lucky. It is often new content to the majority of the party and the people that know what the fuck is happening aren’t sharing their knowledge. If you know that MobX should be killed before MobY, don’t wait until after the wipe to point it out. Say it when the targets are being marked.

If we want progression, we need to take it seriously and quit being a social guild.

We can raid and still be nice to each other. We can hold our raiders to a higher level of personality and attitude expectations. We don’t have to accept assholes.

But if we’re just nice to each other, no one gets to raid.

If no one gets to raid, people are going to leave (more of them).

If people leave, there is no guild.

If there is no guild, there is  no one left to be nice to.