Monday, October 31, 2011

Guild Split

While I was on vacation, my guild shattered into two pieces. I was surfing WoW Progress and I noticed a whole bunch of "X has left the guild", which was a pretty terrible way to find out.

Like many raiding guilds, we've found recruiting to be very hard this tier/expansion. Through regular attrition, we gradually slipped to the point where we were getting 23-24 people on some raid nights. As we were working on hard modes, this made progression very difficulty. We'd get one or two nights where we could field a full raid, and one night where we couldn't

It was decided that we'd split into two 10-mans, so we could at least continue knocking down heroic modes. Unfortunately, the heroic lockouts make it hard to recombine into a 25-man, even if we had the numbers.

I gather that the other 10-man was having drama. It culminated in that entire group, minus our guildmaster who was in the group, leaving the guild.  I felt really bad for our GM after finding out the scope of the split.

So we're basically down to one 10-man worth of people. It's a pretty solid 10-man, we go 6/7 Heroic Firelands.

Taking advantage of the new Guild Transfer Service, we've transferred to the Lightbringer server, a more populated server. I think the plan is to try and recruit back to 25s.

But I'm not really sure what the future holds.

9 comments:

  1. Well first off welcome to Lightbringer! I hope you guys have good luck recruiting, unfortunately my GM has been contemplating transferring our guild off because he says he hasn't been getting many quality applicants.

    I'm sorry about what happened to your guild, that sort of thing is always awful and coming back to it after a vacation really sucks.

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  2. That's really rough. We had to deal with a similar situation back in T10, and with cataclysm looming, we just bit the bullet and stayed with a ten man group. It really sucks when it happens whole you're away from the game, you just feel like they decided to sneak out in the night. My heart goes out to your GM, and good luck with your future endevours.

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  3. Yeah, guild drama sucks. (As if you needed me to tell you that.)

    I make a point of not mentioning any guild type stuff on the blog I share, but yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. And finding out what the hell happened that way only makes things worse.

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  4. This is one of the problems that occurs with fixed roster raiding. There often seems to be someone who doesn't like someone else in the raid and will make raiding a nightmare for the people trying to raid. Often this forms into sides and a large group of people leave the guild.

    Why I believe this is due to fixed roster raiding is that alot of people feel that they could "do better" and as a GM you can't really do something about these people because they usually don't breaak any guild rules. Having an open raid roster allows people to take breaks without destroying raids because you inherently have extra people for raiding. It also allows avoids some the cliqyes that seem to form that bring about the "I can do better" attitude.

    Either way as a GM I went out of my way when I set up my guild in Rift to avoid drama. So far in a roster of over 300 members I've only kicked 1 person over drama since the guild was created. We aren't raiding yet so I'll have to see how it holds up to those stresses but by keeping it casual I hope alot of the drama can be avoided.

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  5. Good luck getting back to 25mans. With these past expansions two making 10 mans give the same rewards it has become MUCH more difficult to convince people to go for the 25s. (Yay Accessibility!)

    Maybe the LFR feature will help with that as it gets people into a 25m frame of mind? I dunno..

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  6. That is always a tricky situation to be in. We went through a period in Rift where we were always running raids with one or two empty slots.

    I'm not sure how the WoW situation is these days but ultimately I had to break down a wall in Iniquity. I sent out a polite note to everyone that we would hold their slot until they told me not to. I actually had some folks say to go ahead and let it go.

    It was tough but I started just pugging those last two slots. Ultimately, with our culture we converted some of those PUGs and started progressing really fast again.

    When you guys get close to max it might not be a bad strategy to try.

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  7. Lightbringer... interesting...

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  8. I'm really sorry to hear about that happening. I think a lot of hard or part-core raiders have experienced this feeling from time to time. It can feel like a huge setback, but most of the raid teams I know who experienced this survived and were stronger for it in the long run. Good luck on your new server!

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  9. Good luck getting back to the 25 mans. It really is the only proper raiding format.

    As a fellow 25 man guilds we've been fighting the constant draw of 10 mans, easier content, easier progress and now even a bit faster to put the last phase of staffs together.

    One of the reasons we avoided it as the worry that the guild might fracture, as you've had.

    Blizzard really need to do something, they've let 25 mans die off, and not lifted a finger.

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