Officers' Quarters: Casual raiding that works
by Scott Andrews 
Apr 28th 2008 at 4:00PM
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.
This is it, folks. This is the final column in my four-part feature about how to take your casual raids to the next level. For parts one, two, and three, click on the purple words with lines under them.
I've noticed in the comments under these features that a few people seem confused about the difference between casual and hardcore raiding. One reader from last week, Ger, put it best:
The point of "casual" is to concentrate on WoW being a fun game more than a chore, but if you want to raid then be prepared to take some dang responsibility and not be a liability to 9 or 24 other people.
That one made me laugh. It's a bit of an exaggeration, yes, but I like that definition. Let's recap what I talked about previously, and follow that up with some more suggestions.
Here are the six suggestions I've already covered:
- Find a committed raid leader.
- Develop a fair loot system.
- Communicate your plan.
- Hammer home the need for preparation.
- Foster an environment of accountability.
- Take both success and failure in stride.
7. Never stop recruiting.
Sometimes I envy the hardcore guilds. In some ways they have it easy. Whenever I see a recruitment notice from a hardcore guild, they usually say something like "BT guild needs one Shadow priest" or "T6 guild needs one Protection paladin and one Resto shaman." For my guild, our recruitment ads are more like this: "Recruiting: All classes and specs."
That's because hardcore guilds have far less turnover than we do. Casual raiding means striking a balance somewhere between having no rules and having too many. Some people will always want fewer rules and some people will always want more. Some people will think you're not progressing fast enough and some people will think that everything is happening too fast. Factor in all the real-life stuff that goes in with a little bit of poaching and the conclusion is inevitable: You're going to lose members.
So for most casual guilds, the day you stop recruiting is the day you start shrinking.
The hardcore guilds also have it easier in that they can much more easily predict who is going to sign up and show up for their raids. They can get by with 35 to 40 members. My guild has far more members than that and yet we still have trouble filling out 25 slots on some nights because no one is required to show up. So we're constantly on the lookout for new people.
8. Never stop training.
One of the burdens of a casual guild is this constant influx of new membership. Unless you're lucky enough to get people who have already run all the raids you're working on, you're going to have to help them learn the encounters.
You'll also have long-time members who are just getting into raiding, and old raiders who just haven't been pulling their weight. Giving up on your own members is not an option for me. We have experienced raiders who know their class inside and out. They might get sick of it, but it's up to them to show these inexperienced or ineffective members how to excel at their role. A casual guild needs every single person who raids to be a genuine contributor, and there's only one way to get them there: personal involvement.
Evaluating raid performance is critical. You can't offer someone the best possible advice without knowing what they're actually doing during each encounter. I've written a whole column about this already.
9. Never stop having fun.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that hardcore guilds don't have fun at all. They do. It's just that, well, casual raiding guilds are better at it. The vast majority of casual raiders are not going to be on the bleeding edge of content. We're not going to be the best-geared on the server. We're not getting any first kills, other than our own firsts. So having fun is the only way we can compete with those hardcore guilds. Fun is a casual raiding guild's #1 commodity.
I judge the success or failure of our raids largely by how much fun people had, not whether we actually made progress or not. Sure, it's nice to down a new boss or farm an entire instance without a wipe, but not if the raid leader is making everyone's night miserable.
Like most casual raiding guilds, we've lost a number of members over the years to more progressed guilds. And some of those people have gone on to be very successful as members of the top raiding guilds on the server. Others have come back. They aren't coming back for the loot, that's for sure. They come back because, as they say, "The game just wasn't fun anymore."
/salute
Send Scott your guild-related questions, conundrums, ideas, and suggestions at scott.andrews@weblogsinc.com. You may find your question the subject of next week's Officers' Quarters! For more WoW Insider coverage of raiding, see our raiding directory.Filed under: Officers' Quarters (Guild Leadership)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Unagieater Apr 28th 2008 4:31PM
"Al'ar loves you THIS much."
Epic EPIC win.
Vlatch Apr 28th 2008 4:33PM
"Like most casual raiding guilds, we've lost a number of members over the years to more progressed guilds. And some of those people have gone on to be very successful as members of the top raiding guilds on the server. Others have come back. They aren't coming back for the loot, that's for sure. They come back because, as they say, "The game just wasn't fun anymore."
I think this describes 1/2 of the people that have left us for more progressed guilds. What do you do for the ones that "want to keep an alt in the guild, but raid with their main."? We usually keep them because they still like to have fun with us, but it just seems like they are straddling the fence sometimes.
Am I being bitter, or is it natural to want people to make a choice between a raiding guild and a casual guild that raids?
Zali Apr 28th 2008 4:57PM
I have been in several guilds since I started to raid. I always seem to be the last one to "jump ship" when it starts to sink, but it is always the same story. All the really solid raiders who have outgeared everyone else will up and bail on the guild over the course of a day or two. Poaching is usually the biggest factor.
I have several friends who have joined a guild that has them raiding six nights a week and while I'm still enjoying Kara runs, they are farming SSC. If you ask either of them they will tell you that they really don't like the guild, but they like the progress. They complain about the people and the schedule that they are forced to commit and that they really don't enjoy playing. Of course, they tell me all this just before asking me to come join them, to which I reply, "Are you insane? You just told me how much you hate it."
Seriously, is progression so important that you will give up the joy you have in playing the game?
Yes, casual guilds are very hard to hold together. There is a lot of work in just keeping it going with enough people who care about the guild, but at least it isn't a second job.
rick gregory Apr 28th 2008 5:10PM
@Zali.... this is the spot I'm in. I could jump to a guild in T5 or even early T6 content... but I don't want to raid 4+ nights a week (and wtf is it with Fri and Sat night raids?? Helloooo... some of us go out drinking with friends!). So I'm in limbo. I'm bored with Kara, but only want to raid 2-3 nights a week. sigh...
Afu Apr 28th 2008 5:21PM
"(and wtf is it with Fri and Sat night raids?? Helloooo... some of us go out drinking with friends!)"
And some of have young children and jobs and can't commit large chunks of time in the evening during the week. So Fri and Sat are all we got.
L2Procreate!
rick gregory Apr 28th 2008 5:28PM
procreate? Nooooo! I couldn't go out drinking then! :)
It just seems odd to me to grab both weekend nights (one or the other would be fine).
Afu Apr 28th 2008 7:02PM
Asking people to regularly commit both of their weekend days is a little steep.
Granted, we haven't gotten our raiding group together (yet!) but my buddies and I have, for the most part, committed to playing SOMETHING together on Friday nights for the past couple of years. So far it's worked well on the Xbox, and it seems to work rather well in WoW. At least at t he 3-5 man level.
That makes it alot easier to do things as a group. We've committed to Fridays unless overruled by RL, so it's regular, dedicated time that we can rely on.
If we decide to do something on a Saturday or Sunday here and there, then it's a bonus.
Verit Apr 29th 2008 3:24AM
If I had a wife and kids I'd probably quit the game. Who has the time?
Mindflayer Apr 28th 2008 5:13PM
It is very difficult to do a casual raiding thing. When you are casual, there is less focus, and when a group does not have a focus, any task-oriented goal becomes very difficult.
Khanmora Apr 28th 2008 6:48PM
The whole point of these columns is to show that casual doesn't have to mean less focused. It means you take the time to have fun.
We don't do 25 mans in my guild (although several of us run with some of the bigger guilds when they need a stand-in) but we can still clear Kara in 3 hours time and we can clear ZA (with 3 timers) coming out of Kara with no 25 man work as a group. Trust me, all of that does take focus, and some superb chain-pulling skills hehe.
There is a difference between casual and scrub.
emoser Apr 28th 2008 6:46PM
@ Vlatch
"Am I being bitter, or is it natural to want people to make a choice between a raiding guild and a casual guild that raids?"
I wouldn't say that you're bitter, but nor would I say it's natural to *want people to make a choice*. It IS natural, however, to *expect people to make a choice* since it I've found the whole 'casual raiding' group a very hard thing to maintain.
Having started my WoW experience on a RP server where the social element came before everything else, it was a long time before I got into raiding. When I did, it was tough for all the typical reasons... mostly because it was difficult to find the large number of people--40--to commit to a regular schedule and to come prepared. Ultimately, my guild went down the path of a 'raiding alliance' where there were four guilds cooperating on putting together a once-a-week team to do Molten Core. Getting to that point took a long time though; I started playing the game at release and it was summer of 2006 before we finally downed Ragnaros.
As with most groups, everything changed with BC. Our alliance didn't make it through the horrible transition of doing 40-mans to doing 10-mans to back to doing 15-mans. There's been plenty written about how jarring that transition is, so I won't go into again here except to say that it was a real difficult thing that was poorly planned by Blizzard and resulted in a ton of drama.
In any case... wanting to avoid the "raiding guild" scene I continued to ry to ramp up to first do Kara then Gruul's with the remanants of my group, but it just wouldn't happen consistently. I'm still not sure why getting a 10-man organized for regular Karazhan runs has proven so much more difficult than 15-man runs of UBRS used to be, but it is. The result was that since BC was released until very recently I was not able to get a regular group of 'casual' players to move into 25-man content. I'm sure some of you have had this experience, but if not... do you know how BORING it is for your itch for raiding to be limited to just semi-PUGs of Karazhan week after week for almost a year? The upside for me at least was that I spent much of the time I'd have otherwise been raiding leveling alts, and rather than having one fully geared 'main', I now have 5 level 70 characters...
Finally, however, I decided that if I wanted to see the endgame content, I'd have no choice but to join one of these 'raiding guilds'. I assumed that I'd have to give up the fun and social elements of gameplay to fully see the endgame, but I was at the point where the lack of progress was frustrating me to the point that I was getting frustrated at the game. So, I started pounding the pavement and was able to get my resto shaman into a guild that was starting SSC/TK.
And you know what? I'm having a blast!
We're raiding three nights a week (Tue/Wed/Fri) with Kara clears ad hoc on Mondays and sporadic clears of Gruul/Mags on Sundays. The group isn't less fun than my friends with whom I played more casually for the last few years, but they're more disciplined. To my mind, those things aren't mutually exclusive. Because when you're in there and trying to take down a boss for the first time, that's fun too! It can be challenging and occasionally disheartening, but the sense of accomplishment when you succeed is worth the effort. Maybe I'm lucky in that I found a group that was mature and dedicated without being uptight--who knows--but I'd submit that if I can find a guild like that pretty easily (it took me maybe two weeks once I decided to do it), then there's probably the opportunity for others out there to find groups that work for them.
It's all semantics, but after my experience I truly believe that you can't find a guild that raids 'casually' beyond Karazhan. But that doesn't meain that you can't find a fun, laid back--but dedicated--'raiding guild'.
Birdfall Apr 28th 2008 6:50PM
I'm very proud of my guild -- we're mostly family and real-life friends, but we have three dedicated raid leaders and just enough rules to keep things running smoothly for raids. It took us a year from formation to get enough people to run 25-mans, but we were ready to do it when the time came. And now our progress is moving at a steady and satisfactory pace.
I didn't realize until reading your articles and some of the replies how badly things could have gone if our raid leaders weren't as dedicated as they are -- that some guilds don't even require people to show up (we have signups and not showing is frowned upon) and that it's possible to get stuck in a perpetual Kara run. I'm more thankful for them than ever now. I owe them big, embarrassing hugs and IRL baked goods.
Rob Apr 28th 2008 7:23PM
Great series of articles, Scott. This should be required reading for all raiding guilds, casual or not. I've been on both sides of the fence and my thought is that casual == for fun and not progression, while serious == for progression. For me, I got frustrated with the lack of progression with my casual guild, but I've known them for a long time. My 'serious' guild I hardly know, since we pretty much only raid together. Anyway. I think if you want to exprience end-game PVE you should be in both types of guilds and see which fits you best.
Kallisti Apr 28th 2008 7:49PM
It's definitely possible to raid successfully in woW with a limited amount of time, but it takes a lot of effort to keep things moving. The guild I'm an officer in, Casual Corps (Frostwolf Horde), raids just 6 hours a week, and in the 2 months we've been doing 25 mans we've reached 5/6 SSC, 3/4 TK and now 2 boses down in Mount Hyjal thanks to patch 2.4.
A lot of us have jobs, families, etc and really can only dedicate so many nights to a video game, so this was our best chance to see the rest of TBC.
Our philosophy is that we're a hard core raiding guild, 2 nights per week. Our goal is to see the rest of the game, and so our only option is to make sure we're focused enough to make the absolute most of our limited raid time. That means reigning in the people who waste everyone else's time. The environment this fosters doesn't sit well with every recruit that stops in, but so far I'm very happy with the results and having a great time.
Gogo casual guilds!
Zan Apr 28th 2008 8:21PM
I don't constantly recruit, though I do constantly train, I ask for select classes to do select roles. I don't want to bring someone in and then not have room for them: That makes drama. We don't want no drama.
One way I've found to "Recruit" people is to do things like set up a partial pug Karazhan (with enough core to carry the raid if necessary 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 super dps), attending pug Karazhan raids on fairly geared alts, or pugging heroics. This especially works with officer alts.
Being generous with loot, non-drama mongering, playing to the best of our abilities, always being prepared, always being on top of our game, and being excellent to others pays off in the long run.
If you can manage to establish your guild in people's minds as a group of "cool compitent people who can raid successfully and still have fun without drama", there's a chance they may reciprocate later, or tell their friends who are looking for a place.
Every now and then, someone brings my guild's reputation to my attention: It's almost always positive feedback, that we have really good well liked reliable compitent players. It makes me proud and it makes people come to us when they're looking a home.
Banard Apr 29th 2008 2:41AM
Interesting articule.
I see our guild as a relax have fun joke around casual guild.
We raid almost every night now, but it is different people.
We raid 25's from monday to thursday. And 10 mans on weekends. With a guild with 100 memebrs it is 90% easy to have all places filled. (there are those odd nights)
The keys is not to depend on one person have a line up. Ensure every one knows that and tension builders get the good old kick in the read end. Have fun and raid.
WoW is a game, and i for one would hate to log on and raid with people yellign freaking out and screaming.
Suspect wipes, lots of em, but learn joke have relax atmosphere and all be good.
Yes, those hardcore raiders that freak out and "THERES A STRIDER ON ME" attuide might get things done faster but with the right group of peopel you will get there too.
Patience is all you need. It is alot more excited to finaly down bosses with a group of friends then it is joining a guild to just see end game content.
Banard, GM of Incurro Noctis 5/6 SSC 3/4 TK.
Aux Apr 29th 2008 5:26AM
Very interesting well written articles about guilds and end game raiding.
I believe that the class of raiding guild you are has nothing to do with the amount of fun you have or the amount of time you spend raiding.
I believe we should consider three levels of raiding guilds (not just two):
1. casual or softcore;
2. moderatecore;
3. hardcore.
While people in all types of raiding guilds likely read forums like Boss Killers about how to do the instances, I believe the cut off point between casual and moderatecore is that in moderatecore guilds many people in the guild read forums like Elitist Jerks and try to maximize their own character potential and help others to do so as well. In the hardcore guilds it is a requirement either implicitly or explicitly stated that everyone is expected to play their characters to their maximum potential, both individually and as part of the team plan. In the moderatecore guilds this is fostered and encouraged but not a requirement to be in the guild. In the truly casual guilds most people don’t worry about maximizing their character raid use as they don’t have the time or inclinaton to do so.
People will still get into the wrong level of guild for them even if you advertise what you expect of character management, as in game dreams and real life reality may not be mutually compatible for all sorts of reasons.
Thanks for the interesting insights.
Regards
Aux, Amicus Credo, Skywall, a moderatecore evening raiding guild
edward Apr 29th 2008 6:38AM
After reading the comments here, I feel more hopeful about my lack of raiding time, although finding a guild that suits is still a huge challenge.
Jeremy Apr 29th 2008 8:49AM
The guild I'm in is very casual. We just started SSC and there is no requirement to show up to anything. There is a core group of people that raid in the 2 main KZ groups, but we have a 3rd group that tries to go every week and if you don't get into one of the first 2 groups, then we fill up the 3rd group for badges.
I'm sure it would be nice to be fully decked out in T6 with dual Warglaves, etc, but I really like the casual nature of the guild and wouldn't give it up for anything.
ShafeNutS Apr 29th 2008 10:46AM
I face a similar problem to many here. I am one of the leaders of a guild that I would say is casual-moderate. We have half people who really want to max character potential, and the other half whether they don't have time or do wouldn't even know where to start if they did. Now some of these players I have leveled form the mid 20s all the way to 70. Got them geared and into Kara and after a full epic set and a gillion man hours of hey go get hat mace or lets get this quest item. Im still stuck with a jackass in all purple gear that is MT that goes whoa cool that raid boss just crushed me ahahaha what is going on again. Why do we put ourselves through this.
It is obvious to me now that without some kind of progression I will probably just stop playing. Does that mean that its time for me to look for a more hardcore guild so I can progress?
I switched to leveling alts and it has been fun, but being a Guild Leader you cannot just log onto an alt and do your own thing. The tells never end or you hear about so and so leaving the guild. My whole comp went down and had to write zeros to my HD (35 hours) and then re-install everything and spent 4 hours of in-game time working on my interface. I was close to quitting WoW as people did nothing but invite me or ask for help the whole time I was working on interface. Then have the gaul to berate me for not coming to help.
I helped EVERYONE! and now it gets me nowhere because all the people who "owe me one" left for progression guilds. My server Mannoroth has multiple guilds downing all Sunwell bosses, so it is one place where Hyjal/BT is on heavy farm. I just was whispered last night by a former guildy who "has lots of 70s on another server" (never confirmed) that I had leveled from 60 up and geared through kara gruuls etc. He was a young punk who would blow up at others who weren't doing what he thought they should be doing. He was a warrior who refused to tank for the guild when we had none and eventually was kicked from the guild for his attitude. Of course he whispers me to show of some his new T6 and to talk about how just downed ilidan. Im pretty sure I am teaching some noob how to d/l omen or some dumb shit.
How do I get skilled players on a server where anyone with skill who actually cares is in BT or is just like me stuck amongst noobs or extreme casuals. Wannabees they want all the loots, but do not want to do anything to get them? Do I have to abandon my guild? What could I offer you if you were in all T4 or better if my guild is only barely able to field a 25-man? Do I have to find 30 players who are partially Kara geared and gear all of them up and keep them all together and then make sure nobody outprogresses anyone so that the only thing left for them is to leave the guild?