Posts with tag waitlist

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.