Oh come on. "Probation" "standby". "Probation" where I come from is a way of saying "prove yourself". Will you get into every raid? No. Should you? No. You were likely recruited because someone else left.

Does that mean you're 100% guaranteed a raid spot from day one? No. Because the guy who was recruited to replace the one who left *before* the one *you* replaced has been there longer, suffering the same sit-outs you now are. It's a ladder. You're on the bottom rung.

To run a 25 person raid, you need 25 people and either a bloody lovely wan connection 18 feet from Blizzard's servers with properly-configured cisco routers and good weather; or 35 people.

Of those 35 people, 3 will no-show. 4 will chain disconnect. 3 others will "lag" so badly that they *request* to be replaced - of those 1 will actually have lag issues beyond their control, and the other 2 just want the night off with no grief. So, your original 35 people at 7pm then becomes 25 by 8pm.

And grats - if you're working on LK, and that remaining 25 happens to comprise 2 tanks, 5 healers and the remainder being your strongest DPS with capacity to stun/slow/kill Valks and move out of defile appropriately; you *might* just get the kill.

But, if 4 out of the "wounded" 10 happened to be healers, leaving you with 4 and an offspec; or one of your so-lagy-it-hurts guys was your MT, you have to pull in the "potential" you grabbed from a levelling guild yesterday. You're neutering your raid's confidence at this point; and barring miracles (which *do* happen, just not often), you are likely knackered.

And, that's just the lucky guilds - the ones who can still field 35 people on a good night, to allow for the "dog ate my homework, significant other's unhappy, ISP is crap, Blizzard sucks at dungeon/encounter/cake design" crowd to take the night off after they've signed up and been allocated a spot in your starting team.

Raid leading's for mugs. I know. I am one.