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Officers' Quarters: When raiders hold your guild hostage
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. In these lean times, guilds need to put up with quite a bit in order to keep a viable raiding roster. Sometimes officers will overlook repeated absences and put aside some of their policies because benching a player means canceling a raid. This situation tends to spiral, as players figure out that they can flaunt the rules without consequence. Sometimes it even reaches the point that players make demands. I've heard of many such situations, but none as ridiculous as this one. Hi, I raid lead a progression 10 man team, raiding nine hours a week since Cataclysm has been released. So far we are doing quite well for progression, but due to two weeks last month where we had one dps team member quit the game without notice we were left trying to find PuGs. We got so many whispers and in game mail complaining about PuGing that we recruited two dps, a pair of friends. One has become the guild's best dps. Since one of them had only seen the first few bosses, we asked one of our dps if he could sit out for two weeks as a favor to us to let her get some gear and experience. Where we started having problems was when we asked her to sit, with 24 hour notice, out Heroic Halfus and Cho'gall in the second week so the other player could get a chance at his Tier shoulders and chest upgrade since he was the only one who could use them if they dropped. Her friend was not happy that she was sitting out and argued she could use the loot from those two bosses, too.
Officers' Quarters: Wait-listing is the hardest part
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. As interest in WoW declines and guilds finds themselves once again facing six months or more of raiding the same content, player retention is going to become a huge issue for officers. For raiding guilds, the hardest players to retain are those on the fringes of your team, the extra three to five people who are most often asked to sit out and be "waitlisted" or put on "standby." These terms are really just euphemisms for the same thing: sitting on the bench. This week, one officer asks how to keep these players from moving on to other guilds. Hi Scott, I'm an officer in a well established 25 man guild. Throughout the 2+ years we've been raiding, we've always had issues with recruiting beyond that 25th player. Whenever we pick someone up, it always seems that someone else drops out, and we're back to relying on every last player in our raid to show up, or else we're running with a man down or scrambling to get a new recruit or a casual guild member in. There have been several times where we did have 29 or 30 people online for raid nights, usually after another guild has collapsed and we pick up a few extra recruits at the same time. However, it always seems to never last.
