Raiding Guilds vs. Non-Raiding Guilds

Recent events have brought to clarity a key distinction that often slips by people who are running or joining a Guild.  No matter how casual or hardcore you're intent is, there is a baseline required to call yourself a Raiding Guild.  If you consider yourself a raiding guild, you need to make the hard decisions of asking people to step out when they aren't carrying their weight.  Additionally, as a member of a raiding guild you need to accept that you will be challenged to improve at some point.  If you don't, its also your responsibility to accept the consequences of not rising to the occasion.

If your Raiding Guild's leadership fails to do this, their talented people will eventually get tired of being held back and look elsewhere for their progression.  Conversely if you cannot, as a raider, handle the demands of the Guild  you can expect that you'll be benched or worse for doing so.  None of this should be new to anyone familiar with the raiding scene.  These are the basis for a group that approaches Raiding with the intent of clearing content.  Regardless of whether they rate themselves as Casual, semi-core(?), or Hardcore.  Those terms are more indicative of the level of time, commitment, and tenacity they take when approaching the raiding scene.

The problem becomes when you have a Non-Raiding guild that is trying to run raids.  These people are typically friends and share other interests that bring them together into a social entity of a guild.  In 'ye olden days' these Guilds would barely step foot into any of the raiding content as a guild, mostly due to the high barrier-to-entry of progression.  Now that the content is more accessible its possible to try and assemble a team and make a go at it.  Depending on the size of a particular guild you could even field multiple teams.  Unfortunately, unless you are lucky enough to have a consistent team of solid raiders (unlikely given that most people of this quality join a raiding guild) you often have a slightly unstable team.  This in itself is detrimental to raiding, the more people you have to cycle the slower the learning curve will be.  Then situations can worsen, when you have a weak link or two in your group you have little recourse compared to a 'Raiding Guild'.  Raiding guilds have charters and/or policy that address performance expectations, typically a non-raiding guild has no such provisions and even if they do there are social foundations that interfere.

These people who are holding back progression are not 'Raiders' they are simply 'People who like to Raid'.  They don't constantly analyze the groups performance and adjust their play style to fit it.  What makes things worse is that Raid Leaders have to deal with extreme social stigma and possible drama should they attempt replace them in the raid.  Suffice to say, each and every time this goes down you can expect drama and a weakening of the Guilds ranks. Unless your Non-raiding guild is full of the most well adjusted people, be careful pursuing raiding content as a guild activity.  Feelings will get hurt, drama will happen, and you could end up losing more than just a raid member.

Giving the blogging thing a real try

Here we are on a late Sunday night and I have the urge to actually talk about my interests.  There's an egotistical side of me that hopes this will draw some attention and wind up being more than just me talking at the Internet and hoping someone cares.  That last sentence sounds angstier read back than I expected; but in a nutshell I've had a fair share of experience on the raiding scene and I'd like to talk about my observations and learning experiences.

Currently I have four level 80's:
80 Hunter (Naxx geared, SV)
80 DK (Unholy Dps/Blood Tank) Geared for ICC10/Entry ICC10
80 Warrior (Prot/Arms) Geared for ICC10/Uld10
80 Holy Paladin (Holy/Prot) Geared for ToC10/Heroics

Below the cut is a long ramble about most of my history as a player.  I've glossed over more recent months as I will be dedicating full posts to those topics.  More to come in the upcoming days.  Comments are always welcome.