Saturday, July 12, 2008

July 12, 2008
6
Summer vacations and raiding, every guild seems to slow down as half the regular members are taking a 2-3 week vacation to a random sunny place in the world. The december month is worse, but still. Age of Conan has been around a while now, and just about all who tried it will tell you it isn't worth the bother. Buggy, unfinished, not enough end-game content. So, now that that has passed... Summer vacations have taken over the slowdown bug. One week you've happily got 35 people wanting to join the raid on a wednesday, the next week there's only 21 people in the raid. Some of which are actually alts or casuals. It's a bother, but better to farm at least "some" gear than to not raid at all. Or is it? The frustrations of those who do attend are mounting up higher each time you wipe on what previously were farmable bosses. Incentive to show up drops lower each day without any chance at progress. We've killed Illidan 4-5 times now, and have started taking some trips into sunwell to learn Kalecgos. However, with recent attendance we've had to call off due to a lack of healers. Some on business trips, some on vacations, some forced to go casual due to real life obligations. There isn't anything a guild can do other than recruit new people. But, new recruits are hard to get when your server has a 2.5 - 1 alliance to horde ratio with only 3-5 guilds actually doing endgame content. Not to mention the need to get those players gear and skill. It's like starting over, quite frustrating. I'll be glad when the vacation periods are over. But, how does your guild manage trough summer vacations or christmas? PS: I just uploaded a "Girls of Warcraft" gallery. I'm also open for suggestions on better (and faster) image hosts. Shareapic is free, unlimited space, size and bandwidth. But it's dreadfully slow currently.

6 comments:

Daniel said...

We've had attendance problems too. Also we have had issues with recruits, despite their gear, being absolutely terrible. Like Mages dying to their own parasites on Illidan.

So we have gone to the recruitment forums and actively sought out individuals looking for guilds who are willing to transfer.

Sara said...

Develop your hybrids. First good hybrids mean you don't have to call the raid because you're missing healers because you can respect MoonkinX. But don't start on Kalecgos though, introduce them to healing on farm nights one at a time. This lets your non-hybrids rest on old content and make old content new again for your hybrid classes.

Alternatively farm night drinking games lead to high antics if the occasional wipe. I have a healer I've been healing with for about 2.5 years and we've got binds to each other. We bet each other "shots" on who will die first and in what way to help with farm night fun when I'm not raid leading. We also have a mage, who likes to play the what did I say in guild chat last night game after farm night drinking. NOTE: Only a good idea if you have a mature (over 18) thick skinned crowd.

bbr said...

Heh, that sounds like a good fridaynight / saturday night idea.
On death = one shot.
We're mostly above 22-25 here, with only the occassional 16+. Most should be able to hold their liqour though.

Exanimo said...

Hybrids can be indeed very helpfull. We introduced offrole kit for gold awhile back with which we convert offrole from a dkp price to gold. (main spec=full dkp, offspec=1/2 dkp or gold).

Since then hardly anything got disenchanted resulting in people with good offspec kit so they are able to fill a different role if needed. As an extra positive side effect we share the gold at the end of the month, actually making money on raids. :)

Unknown said...

Swallow another guild! the perfect potion.

bbr said...

Eating up entire guilds is a solution, however there's a lot of problems that come along with that. We actually have done that once with a previous guild, and in the end you find yourself with 2 groups inside a guild. There will be some mingling but you'll still find people refer to themselves as "old-someguildname".

In the end most guild mergers end up in a guild splitting some months later. Something we don't intend to end up as obviously :)