I’ve mentioned in the past that my guild has had numerous progression problems in the year I’ve been with the guild. A bunch of us had left another guild a year ago and created our own, but that folded after a couple months. We merged with our current guild and I’ve genuinely come to like all the core players a great deal. As a matter of fact that feeling is why I remain in the guild despite the progression issues, but unfortunately one of my real world friends that came along with me and is one of the guilds two main tanks has had enough. He told me last Friday that he’s leaving the guild and will be joining another guild as DPS. He’s not leaving the server, so I’m not really losing my friend, but at the same time it’s a bummer knowing you won’t be raiding together on any normal basis again for the foreseeable future. Throw in the fact that his absence isn’t something the guild will be able to fix at the moment, as there are no other tanks available to replace him. You can imagine the entire episode has lead to some frustrating discussions inside the guild among the officers and select others.
I’ve pushed the officers to use the opportunity to replace those who are under performing or causing problems with an inability to adapt to the situation at hand. Read that as those who are always dying in fires/poison/etc. I pushed my point home that it was simply unfair to the core of the raid team who are performing at or above the level they need to be, and are being held back by those who aren’t. As we are a casual raiding guild we have a lot of people that essentially raid when they want to and are little prepared for raids either in the way of gearing themselves up independently of the raid, or by learning anything about the boss fights before they arrive on the scene. If we were progressing at a reasonable rate it wouldn’t be an issue to be honest, but we’ve hit a wall with Festergut and Rotface and have been stuck there for seven weeks now. And I have no expectation that we will move forward any time soon.
As my friend said, the guild has run into this issue at several points over the past year and in his mind is indicative that the guild is not willing to see the problem for what it is and address it. We’ve gone through periods of limited or extended recruiting in the past but few, if any of those recruits were any better than what they were replacing. As they were mainly recruited to replace people that simply disappeared for whatever reason the opportunity wasn’t taken at those times to assess what was really needed to improve the quality of the raid and we ended up simply recruiting a ranged or melee player that was available. I certainly can’t fault my friend who just wants to progress and see the Lich King and has put in the time, he believes, to be treated to something different than he has been treated to recently. I can’t fault him at all.
We’ve recruited a few new people to the guild since Friday as the guild is, I believe, taking the situation seriously. But only time will tell the real success of the matter.
