Raidar is a neat little site that claims to let players plan and organize guild raids in WoW. It's pretty clear the site is new, so it's not completely done yet (not to mention that almost no guilds are in the system at all), but in my few minutes' experience signing in, creating a guild, and setting up a raid, it all worked pretty smoothly (and AJAX-y, if you're a web designer into terms like that-- the site works like it was built in Ruby on Rails).

So what's still missing? The "planned features" page promises a top-to-bottom guild management system, incluing email raid notifications, character profiles, and even a "Looking for Guild" board. The one thing I missed in setting up a was the ability to set up numbers for class balance on a raid, but over on the site's message board, the creator says that wasn't a priority for him quite yet (seems to me like it would be a big one). But as I said, the site looks smooth-- if he keeps up with it and throws in all the features he promised, it could be the place for raid planners to set up on the Internet.

And as far as I know, there is still a hole for one right now. One of my guilds simply uses our Guildportal message boards to set up and plan raids-- members sign up on the board, and our guild leader keeps track of who signs up and who we need. I know Guildportal has a system for it as well, but none of our members seem to have be interested in using it yet. The other guild I'm in, which is a little bigger, uses the Guild Event Manager addon to announce and plan raids ingame. I do like the way GEM works-- it's easy to use and set up, has that min/max feature that I want from Raidar, and keeps up a constant list of who's signed up for a raid in what class roles.

But the only real problem with GEM is that, as far as I know, it's ingame only. There's no way for me to check when a raid is or sign up for one unless I'm in-game (not always an option, especially at work). If Raidar can fill out its features, and do the same thing that GEM does (but from anywhere), we might have a winner.

Tags: addons, gem, guilds, molten core, MoltenCore, radiar, raiding

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Tips, Guilds, Instances