What happened Tuesday?

[Werehamster]

In case you missed it, which you probably did because there weren't many people on, we failed to get a raid started today for the first time in a while. There were a few people who gave advance warning they weren't going to be around, but for the most part it was just a huge no-show.

What happened? Did everyone lose the will to raid? We couldn't even fall back to a 10-man Ulduar because ... well I don't know why exactly. We had a grand total of five people who were jumping up and down ready to raid anything shouting into silence and absence. Were there people who didn't want to do Ulduar 10 because of this off-the-guild calendar 10 man elite progression raid on Wednesday and they didn't want to be saved? Why not be saved? Let us get the early stuff out of the way on Tuesday, work on it again Wednesday, and then on Thursday when the silence and absence returns we can continue on. At least we'd be making progress instead of having 15 people in the guild all doing dailies and arena.

I'd also be bitter if Wednesday becomes the raid night, because I can't normally make Wednesdays. We spent a good deal of effort to switch our Magic drafts to Wednesday because of our Tuesday/Thursday draft schedule and I'll be damned if I'm going to go through that trouble again.

Yes, I'm bitter. Yes, I probably shouldn't post this. But it needs to be said. Is everyone upset that we spent an entire night wiping on Razorscale? Does no one remember the days of Kara when we died repeatedly on the first few bosses? We learn the fights, we gear up, we get to see more content. Don't give up after three weeks!

[Chamomile]

I think it comes down to two things:

1) We are still not a hard-core guild.
Attendance is still not required. If Member A wanted to disappear for a day / week / month, there are no repercussions. This is nice for a lot of casual players and an irritant for the people that never miss a session. Unless the guild changes a lot, (which I personally hope it doesn't) there will be more times where a night fails to come together because no one came.

2) Many people don't like learning (dying).
In the two guilds I've been with, after each new content patch, most people are gung-ho on the first week. After they see how difficult it is, they disappear until the instance is nerfed or the hard core players learn the fights and become better geared. Later, they will return and things will resume the usual course of events.

The Tuesday + Thursday / Wednesday issue only became a problem today. We'd always done 25 person raids Tues / Thurs, therefore the Wed ten person group never interfered with the main schedule. I'd suspect the people in the pre-scheduled Wednesday run were hesitant to just go with people tonight for exactly that reason. It was pre-scheduled and shouldn't have been an issue. Some of those people may not have been online for whatever reason. Just up and starting a new group and effectively locking them out because they weren't here tonight to see that the 25 person raid didn't happen would be rude. I know -I- hate joining a group to find that the first (x) bosses have already been offed. Not to mention the issues of what happens Thursday when 20 different people show up and 3/4 of them are saved to the same instance.

I don't see any reason that we'd be changing the guild schedule from Tues / Thurs. This fits a lot of people's personal schedules that, in some cases, were tailored specifically for attendance on those days.

Please note that these are all my personal thoughts and opinions, so they may have no true relevance with the current situation.

[Daewen]

I'll be plain to say I somewhat side with Andy on this, however, let's try to find out what these causes are besides speculation;

1) Re: attendance- who's on vacation, hiatus, or otherwise busy with RL? Actually come to think of it, last summer was a slow period too. I can only speak authoritatively for myself: I've been procrastinating getting my cosplays sewn up for Fanime and AX, and now that it's may I've got maybe 2 weeks to crunch. (Stupid me.) For others, well, for everyone that's spoken up to explain where they are, there's 1.3 others who just havn't shown up to say. Actually rather than speculate why they don't show up, I know in some cases people do log in, they just opt out of the raid. I'll admit it, I'm an ass: when people just don't show up, I'll gripe that it's because they didn't like being the one always dying on whatever boss. But I never use names and I never hold it as a grudge- when they show up, we get them in the raid! Anyways, point being: we're miffed when there's absences for which we aren't told why. Project due? On travel? New father? As a friends' guild, let us know!

2) Yeah, this is a good point. I want to impress upon people that just because the instance is being 'nerfed' and 're-tuned', it's still going to be hard. I could dig up the blue posts, but in a nutshell: they want Ulduar to be hard, and there are no tank-and-spank fights. You still have to learn not to die in a fire. You have to learn that there's more to encounters than topping the meters. You are going to die, pay repair costs, buff up, and try it again- A LOT. Welcome to progression raiding- it's not that bad.

[hung]

I know that I have spotty attendance at best (and i'm fine with that mind you, i don't like the concept of hardcore gaming) so i don't know if my feelings are echoed by others in the guild. I will conclude with my 2 cents.
Here's a few observations first though:

Even at peak attendance, we only had a full raid and 4~5 benchwarmers for 2 weeks tops. The rest of the time, we had less raiders.
We progressed through Naxx with an average of 24.5 people, with 2.5 switches through the night (this is supported by WSS, most nights have 27 names)
There were numerous nights when we raided with less than optimum numbers, but did alright because Naxx is easy.
Go back 4 months, and Schadenfreude was still excited about reaching 25 lvl 80 guildies.
At the beginning of Naxx, we had drama over puggers being saved to Sarth

So here's what I feel: we burned our way through Naxx and mugged Sarth&pals for their lunch money, but as a guild, we still barely have enough raiders to support full time 25-man raiding. If we can't make 25-mans, we should downgrade raiding nights to 10-mans. If we feel ambitious, we can try and co-ordinate 2 separate 10-man groups for raid nights. But we need to realize that the days of raiding 25 T/TH and attempting 'Undying' on Wed are over, at least for now.
Downgrading to 10-man will be painful, I know better than most. Some folks won't be able to make it, others will miss out on some bosses. As the token bench warming tank, I can attest to this sucking. But I have to admit that its how the guild moves forward.

Bottom line: Progression first, Achievements later. If you do not raid to save yourself for an achievement run, you are sabotaging guild progression.

[Yryche]

What I have a hard time understanding is why don't people want to be there to learn the new content? Isn't that the fun of it? Once things hit farm mode and everybody and their dog gets easy lootz, the fun is gone. It's just going through the motions at that point. I don't even like reading strats for the first few tries; I'd rather die horribly in a fire that I didn't know was coming at least a couple of times. Have we lost the sense of adventure? Nothing feels better than beating your head on a tough encounter and then beating it! Especially with such great friends as we have here. Is it more fun to actually accomplish something tough, or to have strats hand fed to you after the fact?

*shrug*

[Pocky]

I can only speak for myself, in regards to last night.

The reason I wasn't on was because I needed to take the time to work on real life stuff. Hopefully this won't be an issue tomorrow or next week. I did say this to the people in guild chat before I left, though, with apologies. I do not like leaving people high and dry like that.

As for the Tuesday/Thursday thing, I honestly don't know why so few people were on. I know why a few of us (me, Dom, Tony) were offline for, but that's all. I think that some people were off for real life reasons, I think others might have been turned off by the wiping (which is not fun for most people).

If we need to do two ten-man runs, that's fine with me. I'm okay with and used to wiping a lot to learn things. That's one of the reasons I'm in the Wednesday group - we're all of the same mindset, and admittedly, I don't think I could say that for everyone in the guild, since I don't know every last guild member that intimately.

I don't think we need to switch our schedule; I think Tuesdays and Thursdays work best for the people in guild, for the most part. Unless a large enough number of us need to switch, I think it should stay as it is.

[Logos]

My cousin Bob was in town - haven't seen him in a year, so Jaime and I were out hanging with him (he leaves today).

So - RL impinged. I didn't sign up for that reason.

I still want to progress into Ulduar, though! I frankly like the idea of 10 mans actually. Brings me back to the old days when we'd wipe 10 times on The Beast and laugh our asses off at whoever got punted. Maybe we can post 2 10-mans and see how that goes. I don't know what's happening tonight (Wed), but I'll be on tomorrow to take down Razorscale.

[janin]

My attendance will likely be spotty for a while due to real life issues, so I haven't been signing up. I think I'll be available Wednesday and Thursday this week, though.

I'm still quite interested in Ulduar! I think 10-man is the way to go -- once we have a core group that's familiar with the fights, doing it with 25-man will be much easier.

Adam

[hung]

the biggest challenge with running 2 concurrent 10 man groups, is keeping the two raid IDs seperate. Does anyone have any suggestion as to how to tackle this?
Should we pre-arrange teams?

If we do go ahead and try teams, theres a wednesday group already set. Should we try and piece together a 10 man out of the non-wed people?

Here's a start: Myself and Andy are non-Wed people and are interested in raiding on T/Th. (that's 1 geared tank + 1 geared healer).
LF8M

[Pocky]

the biggest challenge with running 2 concurrent 10 man groups, is keeping the two raid IDs seperate. Does anyone have any suggestion as to how to tackle this?
Should we pre-arrange teams?

If we do go ahead and try teams, theres a wednesday group already set. Should we try and piece together a 10 man out of the non-wed people?

Here's a start: Myself and Andy are non-Wed people and are interested in raiding on T/Th. (that's 1 geared tank + 1 geared healer).
LF8M

If we're going to split, then yeah, pre-arranging the teams would be the easiest thing to do.