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I've got my own WoW guild, have it at for quite a long time, going on 2 years now. We've got a core group of people who have always been with us. Then we have people that join, use our resources to level and skillup their professions and then move on. The excuse is always the same "You aren't moving fast enough for me".

Up until about 6 months ago, we didn't have enough people that were A) Geared and B) Online at the same time to do Karazhan. We only had 2 tanks, and we lost them both to real life issues, people were having scheduling conflicts, etc...

I took over a friends account and made his Arms warrior into a tank, and one of our healers rolled a tank. Scheduling conflicts got cleared up, and we've had Kara on farm since. But we still lose people to the "You're not moving fast enough for me" excuse.

Orginally we were DPS heavy, and short on tanks and healers. So like I said, I made a tank, and one of the healers made a tank, and one of our DPS made a healer. We adapted to the situation and cleared Kara. About a month ago we got an influx of tanks. As in, like 4 new tanks. 2 of them were brothers. Things were looking good towards moving into 25 man content, just needed a couple more healers. So again, we decided to adapt... I rolled a healer and another of our DPS made a healer and we've been leveling them like bandits and gearing them up.

I logon yesterday to find out that the brother tank team left the guild, citing the oh so popular "You aren't moving fast enough". These 2 guys were not even Kara geared yet, and we were putting them thru Kara and Heroics every week to get them whatever they needed. Yet they're suddenly ready to move on to 25 man content. WTF can I do to get people and keep them? We can't start 25 mans with what we have, and we can't recruit anybody, because people want to be in 25 man content... it's a catch 22.

And we are very upfront with these people when they come in that we want to move to 25 man stuff, but we don't have all the roles quite covered and it might be a little while before we can do it. What irks me even more is that there is only 1 guild on my server that has cleared BT, and only 9 that are into TK, and most of those are only farming Loot Reaver, 3 have cleared SSC, 6 have cleared Mag, 14 have cleared Gruul. We are not the most advanced server if you didn't notice.

But most of those guilds refuse to take people that are not already geared for the content they are running... and I have seen posts from the officers of the BT guild on our realm forums telling people to come to my guild to gear up and get experience and reapply to them later. I mean WTF, I am not the server designated noob trainer.

So, anybody got any advice for me?

GibsonSG wrote:
So, anybody got any advice for me?

Speak English.

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 9:00 am Post subject:

Set higher standards for admission.

If you don't refuse to take people that are not already geared
for the content they are running, you are the training ground,
the place people go to get ready for the place they want to go.

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 10:11 am Post subject:

ThunderDawg wrote:
Set higher standards for admission.

If you don't refuse to take people that are not already geared
for the content they are running, you are the training ground,
the place people go to get ready for the place they want to go.

But that doesn't really work for us. All we're running is Kara... the requirements for it are nothing special. A new level 70 can be geared enough to start Kara in less than a week. They come to us ready to enter Kara, we run them through Kara for about a month at which point they are geared enough to move on to Gruul and that's when they leave. Because they're ready to move on, and as a whole the guild is not. We can't get any friggin healers to save our lives, nobody wants to heal these days. And that's really all that we lack to move to 25 mans. We have 25 people geared and ready, but of those 25, 3 are tanks and 2 are healers... and we need at minimum 6 healers.

T wrote:
GibsonSG wrote:
So, anybody got any advice for me?

Speak English.

S'What I was thinking. Although, this is the comic that came to mind.

hummer010 wrote:
T wrote:
GibsonSG wrote:
So, anybody got any advice for me?

Speak English.

S'What I was thinking. Although, this is the comic that came to mind.

Yeah, I read Real Life... and incidentally, I do that exact thing to my friends as well. Razz

I have a ring of friends that play, and a ring that don't. I love to torture them with WoW talk.

GibsonSG wrote:
hummer010 wrote:
T wrote:
GibsonSG wrote:
So, anybody got any advice for me?

Speak English.

S'What I was thinking. Although, this is the comic that came to mind.

Yeah, I read Real Life... and incidentally, I do that exact thing to my friends as well. I have a ring of friends that play, and a ring that don't. I love to torture them with WoW talk.

It took your original post for me to understand the first frame of that Penny Arcade comic; "tanked Kara as a prot specced pally", indeed. I had no idea what Kara was, nor how one might "tank" it, nor what a "prot specced pally" might be. Now, thanks to your post, I can understand it.

Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 12:30 am Post subject:

You could always do what we do in our Guild (EQ2) accept that sometimes (always in our case) people think they will be happier elsewhere and therefore leave.

I guess it is harder if one wants to be a raiding guild or to do most stuff in-guild. Perhaps the need for that is bigger in WoW.

Not saying your current goals for the guild is wrong. Just saying...

Q: "not fast enough"... I seem to get the feeling you think that is an excuse. What do YOU think the real reason is?

(Sorry id this is not coherant. I've go a high fever and is in bed with a laptop.)

/Akely

Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 2:30 am Post subject:

Akely wrote:
You could always do what we do in our Guild (EQ2) accept that sometimes (always in our case) people think they will be happier elsewhere and therefore leave.

I guess it is harder if one wants to be a raiding guild or to do most stuff in-guild. Perhaps the need for that is bigger in WoW.

Not saying your current goals for the guild is wrong. Just saying...

Q: "not fast enough"... I seem to get the feeling you think that is an excuse. What do YOU think the real reason is?

(Sorry id this is not coherant. I've go a high fever and is in bed with a laptop.)

/me passes the sick kitty some warm milk and several balls of yarn to keep warm with / entertained.

/Akely

Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 5:39 am Post subject:

Akely wrote:
You could always do what we do in our Guild (EQ2) accept that sometimes (always in our case) people think they will be happier elsewhere and therefore leave.

I guess it is harder if one wants to be a raiding guild or to do most stuff in-guild. Perhaps the need for that is bigger in WoW.

Not saying your current goals for the guild is wrong. Just saying...

Q: "not fast enough"... I seem to get the feeling you think that is an excuse. What do YOU think the real reason is?

(Sorry id this is not coherant. I've go a high fever and is in bed with a laptop.)

/Akely

I'm fine with people leaving, they come and they go.. that's never going to change. But I've got to be able to keep some people one way or another or we're never going to get past the current 10 man dugeon that we raid every week (which is getting boring as hell) and into 25 man stuff.

As for the not fast enough thing... there are some people that legitimately leave for that reason. We've lost quite a few that stuck it out for a bit and basically collected every piece of gear they needed out of Kara and continued to clear it with us for a few more weeks, then they tell me they're moving on. While I don't necessarily like it, I can understand it.

On the other hand, in case of the brother tank team I referred to earlier. Neither of them is actually ready to move on to anything else. They didn't have the gear for it yet. They couldn't tank all the way through the 10 man we're currently doing and survive, yet they're saying we're moving too slow and they're ready to move on? Kara has a reset timer on it, can only be cleared every 7 days. We can't go any faster. We clear it in 4 hours or so every single Saturday. So in that case, yeah... I think it was an excuse for something else. But I don't know what.

Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 5:56 am Post subject:

GibsonSG wrote:

On the other hand, in case of the brother tank team I referred to earlier. Neither of them is actually ready to move on to anything else. They didn't have the gear for it yet. They couldn't tank all the way through the 10 man we're currently doing and survive, yet they're saying we're moving too slow and they're ready to move on? Kara has a reset timer on it, can only be cleared every 7 days. We can't go any faster. We clear it in 4 hours or so every single Saturday. So in that case, yeah... I think it was an excuse for something else. But I don't know what.

It sounds to me (and bear in mind the last time I did anything guild-related was back in my EQ days years ago, so take it with a grain of salt) these guys want to go faster than their own abilities and equipment will allow.

My thoughts (if I were you) would be "fine, let them get their asses handed to them because they're not prepared and too impatient to get prepared", as that's what will likely happen - they'll join another guild who will ALSO find them equally unprepared as your guild has, and they'll either have to choose to take the time and effort to prepare them (which is what you were doing), or they won't be included on raids (or if they are, they'll probably be the first casualties).

Long story short: let 'em go and take comfort in the fact that their own impatience is going to cost them.

Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 9:08 am Post subject:

Just a thought:

Guild Alliances. Is that an option? There must be meny more Guilds in the same situation.

I personally have no experience with GA. But it is something we are considering in our guild.

/Akely

Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 10:41 am Post subject:

Akely wrote:
Just a thought:

Guild Alliances. Is that an option? There must be meny more Guilds in the same situation.

I personally have no experience with GA. But it is something we are considering in our guild.

/Akely

We've actually tried that. Originally we didn't even have 10 people we could count on for Kara so we allied up with another guild that was in the same situation and while it furthered our goals and got us where we wanted to be there were so many differences with guild leadership that it just turned into a nightmare. It eventually got to the point where both guilds had enough people to run 10 mans on their own... so we kind of just let things be. If they were short a man they would ask us and vice versa and we were looking at doing 25 man stuff in the future. But the tension got so high that it just wasn't going to work out. Their guild leader and I didn't see eye to eye on alot of issues. And several of their members and our members weren't getting along too well... differences in senses of humor and things of that nature. To us it just wasn't worth it to have to walk on eggshells around these people just to get a raid done, it wasn't fun.

The straw that broke the camels back so to speak happened more recently. A guy that used to be in our guild but left to form a guild with his brother approached us about running 25 man stuff. They had lost alot of their usual raiders to scheduling conflicts and college. We were working out a deal with them. Well the first guild that we had allied with got wind of it and kind of nosed their way in. We had a bit of a council going between guild officers deciding on loot rules and the like. Well you get 25 slots, we thought it would be fair to split things evenly... 9 people for the guild that approached us, and 8 from the other 2 guilds. The bigger guild agreed that this was fair, but the guild from our original alliance did not. They had more than 8 people geared and ready, so their opinion was that they should get more spots than my guild. And things really went downhill from there. Alot of the frustrations from our 10 man alliance came out into the open and alot of people got soured on guild alliances at that point. So we made a decision as a guild not to partake anymore unless all parties involved were in total agreement.

And from the core of people in my guild who make up the raiders, it was kind of unanimous that they would rather take the time to recruit and go it alone then have to depend on any outside help at all. And I agree with them, from what I've seen it's just not worth the headache. Now we all still have friends who are either unguilded or happy in their current guilds and don't want to join up, and we call on them time to time to fill spots, and that's fine. Unfortunately none of them are healers or tanks so it doesn't really help us in our current situation.

Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:40 am Post subject:

Well, lets see in the past 4 months I have been an GM twice, an officers 4 times, and grunt twice. Failure of a guild mirrors real life, laziness, unfocused, jealousy, aggressive, and so on and so on.

My realm sucks only 1 guild has made it to BT the rest are just fucking around acting like monkeys throwing poop at each other.

GM needs to be goal focused, not gearing his/her toon first. Must get officers that share that same idea. Willing to weed out trouble fast, do let weeds grow.

Guild officers must be adults and know where the GM wants to go and agree with it.

Members need to know that while the guild is away to gear up, its not the only way. Each person is responsible for their own progress regarding loot through badges and attending raids.

Guilds need to know that Raid leaders are in control and will setup raids to benifit the group not one person. So 8 prot warriors will not be running in the same group.

Guild chat is ok in the general channel, NOT IN RAID CHANNELS!!!

Lastly End content is not a DPS race, know your role, know the fight, and don't over reach.

Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2008 5:27 am Post subject:

Hi, I played as a main tank, co-leader and raid leader in a Sunwell guild for a long time and I feel your pain with recruits.

We had a forum where we would get recruits but they were, by and large, shit.

We used to poach a LOT of players, talk to people who were disenchanted by their guilds progress, plant the seeds in their minds. Find out which guilds are close to dying and try poach a few players then. Even try poach a few from stable rival guilds.

We had a great, small community, alot of Finns, Swedes, Hungarians and Brits who would entice some nice applications as well.

The jump from 10 to 25man, pre-wotlk, is HUGE unfortunately. If I were in your situation I'd wind down a bit, see how raiding is in wotlk and maybe consider a friendly merge for raids to get the numbers you need.

Best way to keep people is shiny fat purples but thats nothing new.