I had a dream...

I had a dream that we would be able to clear Kara. I had a dream that come WotLK we would be able to enjoy the 10-man raids.

After weeks and weeks of struggling getting a second raid night going, I am now consigned to admit defeat. Our guild will never clear Kara before the expansion, which makes me very sad. We are a small, social guild and no one ever expected us to be able to do 25-mans - all I wished for was to be able to clear Kara. Not a big thing you might think, but you need more than 3 hours to do it (at least at our gear/experience level).

We always field a team on Tuesdays and sometimes we might even be oversubscribed by a whole person - one record week we even had 2 reserves. We have a few people that always sign up for our attempted 2nd raid night (we have tried pretty much every night of the week now), but we have never been close to filling it. With that in mind I can't see that we can recruit - the only person whom I can imagine being tempted by this state of affairs is exactly the person we wouldn't want. The person who will run with us on the parts of Kara we have on farm and get most of any suitable gear that drops as few of us have anything we want from in there by now - and then promptly leave for a guild that raids.

Have I thought about changing guilds? Of course I have - a million times and more. My problem is that most guilds that raid seem do so more than I would be able to. I would love to raid twice a week - and I might be able to do 3 times some weeks - but the minimum seems to be 4 times per week and that is not an option for me.

There is also the fact that the social side is important to me when I play. When I am not in a raid (or farming mats/gold) I like pottling about on one of my alts. If guild chat is mostly dead or people are not fun to be online with - then that would not work for me.

As you can probably tell I am feeling quite down about the whole thing. Just the thought of leaving my guild feels wrong, but after having tried for so long with no traction for raiding a bit more or getting the social side more active, I just don't know what to do.

Goodnight sweet Prince

And Prince is down!! On Tuesday night we had our first Prince kill - it was such a buzz. Now I know that for most guilds Kara is very old news, but for us this is huge.

First week of December 2007 was when we first set foot in Kara. We had a grand total of 10 raiders, all freshly attuned with gear so new it squeaked when we moved. Our guild never raided pre-TBC and never even had organised runs until a group of us decided that we wanted to try Kara and set up regular runs for gear and attunement.

Since that first visit we've had some downs. Half the original core group left for raiding guilds or retired from the game. We have still not been able to get a second raid night off the ground. But we've had ups as well. We've found some fab new raiders and we've managed to improve enough to fit more and more into our 3 hours of raiding per week.

First it seemed that we'd never be able to have time for proper tries on Curator, then that we'd never have time to get beyond him. Now I think it is safe to say that we have everything up to and including Curator on farm. We've downed Illhoof on all evenings we've tried, except for once. Aran unfortunately still eludes us, we've only tried him a couple of times, and then never with great success.

On Tuesday we went straight from Curator to Chess as we were running out of time (we had a couple of early wipes due to carelessness). When we finished Chess someone suggested giving Prince a try as he is so close after Chess. There was a unanimous decision to extend the raid time to give it a go. Everyone was super-excited to try something completely new. With good use of soulstones and self-rez we didn't have to worry about respawns and had two very good tries. Third time it all came together and Prince went down. I was so proud of everyone!!


Oh, and did I mention that I got my grubby little hands on Light's Justice? Yay! Though admittedly I only got it as the other healer who out-rolled me, graciously allowed me to have it as he had got Shard of the Virtuous the week before.

I'm now officially Kara-ed out loot-wise, not sure whether to be happy or sad about that.

The Adolescent Guild

The guild that I joined a long, long time ago as a very new and green WoW player is a-changing.

A few months ago our founder and original GM decided to retire from the role. He had started the guild to be a home for people that wanted some fun banter in gchat while levelling and maybe group up sometimes when it took someone's fancy. All very casual, relaxed and small scale. These days we usually sit at around 60-odd accounts, but as most of the active members as also alt-a-holics, we tend to have about 150-odd characters in the guild. So not large, but big enough to create a need for a bit of organisation, which our GM did not have the time for. So he handed over the mantle to one of the long-term officers, who I think would have done a great job, but he then ran in to RL stuff and had to leave the game. None of the other officers were quite ready to take on the responsibility of GM-ship, so we decided to institute a council to run the guild.

So now we have a guild on our hands and we need to figure out what it should be when it grows up.

We have many members, but few are active in the guild. They have been in the guild for a long time, but you never hear them on gchat, not even to say 'Hi!' when they log on - and heaven forbid that they should ever post on the guild forum. So even if put ideas and proposals for the guild's future on the forum I doubt we'd hear back from more than the handful of people that we normally hear from on the forum.

We know that we will never be a full-on raiding guild and we are happy with that. Kara is on farm up to and including Curator and we are trying to find a second raid night so that we can progress further. The guild does not have enough people interested in raiding to do 25-mans and that is ok. Members who have decided that they want to raid more have departed to raiding guilds and every so often we've welcomed them back again when they decided it wasn't what they wanted. I have seen in quite a few places the comment of that "you don't have to like them to raid with them". And for a proper raiding guild I can absolutely see that - well, up to a point anyway. I'm sure most raiding guilds won't put up with people behaving as complete twunts towards other members, no matter how good their DPS is - but for a guild that has in the past mostly had a social focus it is important that people get on and enjoy hanging out together in gchat.

So we're not a raiding guild, more of a social guild. But what do we mean by social? Do we just want to liven up gchat? Do we need to arrange in-game entertainment like naked Deadmines? Set up a schedule for instance runs to get people doing more stuff as a guild?

Most of all I wonder whether we need to do something about all those members we have that are not active at all? What can we do to make them participate? And if they do not want to participate - should they still be in the guild? It's not like they are doing any harm being in the guild per se, but it seems a bit pointless. If we weeded our membership would that create a bit of a shock-wave making some other people leave or would it maybe make it feel closer and encourage more togetherness?

All questions and no answers at the moment, but I hope to be able to start finding answers as we move along our learning curve on guild management.