The year is 1941…

As promised, a discussion of the guild activities from the other week.

My original guild had been running with Shadow Rising for a few months when we were offered the invitation to merge.

Shortly after the merge, several people left. It was referenced once that those who left didn’t like the fact that new people were being brought in. This may or may not be true, it was said in passing.

Fast forward several more months.

SR is now a ranked guild for 10-man ICC progression. From the looks of our competition, we’re the top guild that is ranked for 10-man ICC that is not doing 25-man ICC. That means that the guilds above us are clearing 10-man with their 25-man gear.

We are actively recruiting and have accepted some incredible people. (If you’re interested: http://www.shadow-rising.wowstead.com/)

We have scheduled raids that start *almost* at the scheduled time (still need to teach a few people how to use the calendar, but it’s generally within 15 minutes that we start), we are able to provide gear enhancements and flasks to our raiders, get the kills, pick up the purplez, /cheer.

It’s a bit different than when we first joined up and raids happened if we had enough people on and those people felt like raiding.

We’ve got a little more structure now. The rank of “Officer” actually means something. Applications are reviewed, interviews are held, recruits are evaluated.

Our members are genuinely nice people that also happen to be good at playing their class. We are not elitists (except maybe Dark/Soth), but we do take our raiding seriously. We enjoy the time we spend together, working together as a team. We joke and laugh and have fun killing shit. There’s a balance.

Somewhere along the way in my short tenure as GM, I’ve also overseen the institution of concentration camps, called for genocide, and relocated us to Europe.

Wait. What?

We saw the return of several people that had left the guild back in the Ulduar days. Some had actually left, complete with server transfer, without ever saying a word and others had just allowed their characters to remain dormant in the guild roster for months.

They came back and brought friends.

(These are what I call Fair-Weather Raiders. They only stay active in the game when there is new content to see and will disappear for huge stretches of time, generally with no warning, expecting upon their return everything to be just the way it was when they left.)

Hey, great to have you back, nice to see some new faces.

Except… they’re on the East Coast.

I have raiders on the East Coast. I have raiders on the West Coast.

A couple months ago, we took a poll, gathered availability data, had a guild meeting, built a spreadsheet, and came up with a schedule that was a compromise for all time zones involved, but got everybody into a raid.

Raid schedules were posted and have been in effect ever since. When we recruit, our recruits (even the East Coast ones) understand and accept the raid schedule. If they can’t meet the schedule, they don’t apply or they bow out.

The conversations about the raiding schedule have been numerous and lengthy. The schedule is the way it is to accommodate the veteran players, the ones that have been here since Ulduar, ground out Trial with us, and were ready on Day 1 to set foot into ICC. These are the guys that have put in the time and effort to keep their gear up to par and stay involved in the guild.

The new group returned after the raid schedules had been set. The raid hours don’t work for them.

They want to run their own raids, at their own times. In doing so, they managed to get a few people locked to content that we were running later in the week. Now we didn’t have enough people to run that content.

We were just at the point where I could field a 25-man raid capable of taking on VoA, Ony, and Trial. Not quite to ICC yet, but damn close. The second 10-man group was supposed to be in ICC last week, but wasn’t able after 2 members of the raid got saved to ICC.

The guild was NOT at a point where it could support a 3rd raid group. Even if we moved the second raid group to an earlier time, I then lost all my West Coast raiders that would still be stuck at work. On top of that, if people can’t meet the 10-man raid time, we wouldn’t have them for 25-man raids – which is the ultimate goal.

So what happened is we ended up with a clique of the people that came back, their friends, and their own raids.

It was like I had a baseball team, with a subset of players that were off on another field on different days. They’re wearing our uniform but that’s where the connection ends.

(Interesting side tidbit – a few of the friends did fill out applications after joining (at my insistence since we had just implemented the decision that all new people would be required to submit apps) and upon reviewing their applications, we would not have accepted most of them. Pro tip when filling out a guild application: the answer to the question, “What are you looking for in a guild?” should never be “phat lootz” if you wish to be taken seriously.)

We had vent meetings and we talked in chat, and eventually the situation hit the guild forums where it really came to a head.

And then one of their members lost the internetz.

I feel that some people are changing a guild that was filled with Friends/Family, to something that reminds me of 1941 Germany.

Sorry, I invoke Godwin’s Law here.

But I could be wrong. Maybe he was in Germany in 1941. Maybe back then there were other guilds facing similar issues of attempting to balance participating in a game over multiple time zones while dodging patrols and trying not to be slaughtered. Maybe our own situation is much more dire than I had perceived and the military police will be at my door any minute. /sarcasm

(Seriously, 1941 was a devastating time. If you would like to be depressed for the rest of the day, here’s a timeline of the year from the NAAF Holocaust Project. There is never a justifiable reason to compare a mundane situation to the Holocaust, unless you’re trying to look like an idiot.)

They argued back and forth about changing the raid times and just letting them do “their own thing.”

I’m sorry. But Shadow Rising is a guild. And in a guild, particularly one that is progression-minded, people should be able to work together for the common goals of the guild. Having a group off in the corner doing their own thing does not fit that. That’s a group of people using the guild bank and ventrilio.

If you join Shadow Rising as a raider, which they did, then you raid with Shadow Rising, in our scheduled raids. We tackle 25s on Tuesday and 10s on Thursday. If the raid you wanted to run wasn’t touched on those 2 days or you missed out, there is Friday through Monday to PuG it.

I hope there is a time in the near future where I can have a 3rd 10-man group. That would provide an excellent cushion for the 25-man content. But guess what? I’m still not going to schedule it any earlier than 7:30 server (central).

When it became clear that we were not going to budge on the raid times, the group eventually left. We wish them the best of luck.

Since they were generally unable to come to our raids, I didn’t lose any core raiders with their departure.

But we are always looking for people to fill out our raids.

If you understand and appreciate a raid schedule and want to raid with people that actively work towards guild success, you might want to check us out. http://www.shadow-rising.wowstead.com/