Jul 30, 2008

Should We Stay or Should We Go?

I was quiet yesterday.  I am sorry.  I was mentally sorting through some WoW things that popped up after our raid Monday.
 
Bottom line, the officers were talking about the various paths my guild could take.  One is to continue on as-is, working on M'uru and recruiting our behinds off to maintain an active pool of players.  We're doing about 3-4 1-hour long interviews every week and Fozec scans the LFG forums everyday looking for classes we're getting low on (like holy priests).  We added a mage and warlock just last night.
 
Another option is to take a break until WotLK.  We've been raiding every. single. week. since about 2 months into BC.  We haven't missed a raid, although we have called one or two early.  It's summer, people have friends and families, M'uru is designed to make us spin our wheels...
 
We also talked about merging with another guild, or even transferring servers.  One issue we run into is potential raiding recruits are turned off by our "RP-PVE" server status.  "Do you guys rp?" is the number one question we get from people in interviews.  The connotation is if you rp, you're going to spend a ton of time talking your way through an instance rather than just killing things.  There are a lot of people that are scared to rp, too.  I can only imagine how many people have blown us off merely for our server type.
 
And by being an rp server, we don't draw the type of people that want to raid.  Our recruiting is 100% cross-server at this point.  The closest Horde guild in progression just downed Kalecgos.  Beyond that there isn't much.  And would you really want to transfer to a server where only 2 guilds are doing end game?  Personally I'd be kind of scared.
 
The guild we'd theoretically merge with is Alliance.  Yes, that's right.  We'd be rerolling.  lol  The downside is I royally pee'd off one of their members a while ago, so I doubt I'd want to make the move.
 
The most likely option besides just keep doing what we're doing is to take a break.  I feel like if that happened I would try to find a guild that would get me through the last two bosses of the game.  I don't want to give up when we're so close.
 
In the end, though, we're still recruiting and still making a go of things.  I don't have a solution for finding more holy priests, which is what's keeping us from being viable against M'uru.  One idea is to switch back mains and work on gearing up my priest.  We also got a really good warlock/priest alt applicant that we could do the same with potentially.  I posted a recruitment plug on PlusHeal.  I'm going to do the same on MMO Champion and anywhere else I can find that might have priests.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain; I think most end game raiding guilds are going through the same thing right now. It is to be expected though I guess - it's summer, and an expansion is on the horizon. The only real reason to raid at this point is to say you've cleared it and see content.

The top guild on our server (Doomhammer-US-PVE) recently re-rolled on a PVP server. They had been on our sever since the game launched, and were always first in progression - until now.

They were stuck in a rut on M'uru, like a lot of end game guilds apparently. They did manage to finally kill him (it?) but they decided it wasn't worth it to try to recruit from a smaller pool of players who were worried about transferring to a PVE server and being stuck not able to transfer off to a PVP ever again.

Hopefully, at some point, Blizzard will fix this problem, but I have my doubts.

Darraxus said...

Funny thing is in our guild Alliance side we have about 5-6 raiding Holy Priests but we have trouble finding other healing classes.

Captain The First said...

I doubt it would be worth the effort to move servers at this point in time. It's summer everywhere and raid activity will be hitting rock bottom anytime soon. Guild mergers are tricky for the most part anyway and with summer upon us the question begs to be asked that even if the merger is succesfull now will it still be after everyone comes back expecting things to be a-ok?

People are taking a more relaxed approach to everything.

If you really want to see the last few bosses right now then you're probably better off hooking up with a guild that is still going fairly strong and offering your services for a month or two before returning to your own outfit.

Anonymous said...

Guild mergers are tricky. My guild offered to do one with the other top Horde guild and they declined. Probably just as well, since it's only them and us at the top end of the raiding progression. We needed each other to keep the feeling of competition to keep people sharp.

We're also on an RP-PVE server and a very low applicant pool. We've gotten some steller transfers though-- people whose guilds broke up at various points of raiding, one over Archimonde, one over Felmyst.

These people were attracted to our more laid back style of raiding schedule (only 3 days a week, 3 hours strict cut off). One guy wanted more family time, one guy just got a gf, one guy's job was getting more demanding etc... They are around for the long haul.

We've had to dig really deep for appliants, but eventually through friends of friends and the recruitment forum we get a few good apps. But we're not at the bleeding edge of content. On the other hand, we've never lost anyone to a more advanced guild on or off server. Just lost people to guitting the game.

Good luck deciding what to do.