Today, I had a discussion with a friend who is in a raiding guild, about a guild policy that they had. Their policy, as I gathered from my friend’s words and my own observation, is as follows:

On any and all raids, progression and farm alike, you may be pulled out of the raid for any boss, if the leaders feel they do not need your specific role or class at that moment. This might be for the rest of the instance, or just a few bosses, you may not be told anything definite. It might be a hardmode or normal, it might even be something you could have steamrolled in your current setup.

The policy seems to be that if there is a better option, that better option will be utilized, regardless of whether it is needed to beat the encounter. My friend spoke of this as if it was perfectly natural. (He did casually mention that if you kept signing up and were “very good”, eventually they would stop replacing you, perhaps assuming that this made it all okay. I inferred that “very good” should also refer to the state of your relationship with the people in charge.)

The other day, while I was “helping” this guild on a farm raid, I kept noticing that every boss attempt, a few people would hearth out or log off, and some new people would be summoned in. Knowing that the guild had problems with attendance, I had just assumed those people were filling in spots until the latecomers arrived, or maybe they were alts just helping, or maybe some of them had irl issues and had to go.

I was astonished when I realised it hadn’t been just those. Some of those people were simply being removed, because there was a better option online to beat an encounter they had on farm. Maybe they would be invited back, maybe they would not.

When I said that I could never commit four hours a day, three or four times a week, to raiding, knowing that I could be sat out on any content for an unknown amount of time if a better option came up, my friend responded “With this attitude, how will you find a better guild? I have been in many guilds, and most of them had this policy. You will not be able to get into any guild thinking like this.” He added, “If I am left out, I just go PVP and earn DKP by not even being in the raid. I don’t see why it is such a big deal.”

“Barring the fact that you set aside this time to raid, with an implied promise by the guild that you were being invited to raid – and now you’re spending it PVPing just in case you are needed again, when the boss would have been just as dead with you there?” I wanted to respond, but somehow managed to hold my tongue. He is rather protective of his guild.

I, of course, acknowledge that this policy and similar policies have a place. In an extremely high-end guild, or on progression content, or on farm content that is not manageable with the current setup. (Even on progression content, I know of many guilds who would rather make it work with the people who have signed up and stuck with the raid through the wipes, than bring in new people, but I digress.)

The guild in question is middle of the road by the server standards. Which was the reason why I looked into them to begin with, and which was the reason why this policy was a big surprise.

If an encounter is otherwise not defeatable, sitting out isn’t just selfless, it’s the only option. This situation comes up in every raiding guild. It is completely understandable. However, if people are frequently requested to sit out to obtain optimal makeup through content where the guild is beyond needing it – it really scares me that I’m seemingly the only person who has a problem with this.

If we take a general look, many guilds expect that you will fully dedicate yourself to the guild, and maintain this loyalty. You will be expected to keep certain attendance requirements, turn up on time repaired with needed consumables, read up on strategies, contribute to the guild bank, and various other rules that are laid down by the guild. It is all for “the guild”, this faceless entity that demands your time, effort and respect.

What most of these faceless entities don’t realise is that this is a two-way street. The guild and its members enter into an agreement, and both sides make implied promises to each other.

If members will be loyal to the guild and its aim, a good guild in turn is expected to be loyal to its members, and not just those who are favored by the GM and officers. If the members provide for the guild bank, the bank needs to provide for them. If members turn up when the raid is due to start, they expect that the raid is started on time, and ends on time. It should not only be the individual members that are expected to fulfill the promises they made when they filled out the application form.

I was in a 40 man raiding guild for roughly a year during vanilla. This was a guild that raided seven days a week, and had strict attendance requirements. Expectations from members, in attitude and skill, were high. You had to be punctual, you had to play well, you had to have read strategies and had to be able to follow commands. You were expected to have the best gear you could have outside of raids before you were even considered for a raid spot. Leaving before the raid was called was absolutely unheard of, being late always cost you DKP and a raid spot.

In return, the members knew that the guild would not just be a guild, it would be a true home for them. Most members knew each other very well and greeted each other by their real names. New babies, weddings, engagements were celebrated together. The camaraderie was encouraged by the guild leaders, who themselves were very close friends.

Loyal members who had to go on extended breaks always came back to the raid spots they left, even if that meant the guild would have to go with one or two less or a class for some time. We had a longtime member who had to be away for very long periods every summer. Everytime he came back he would promptly start signing to raids, and he would still be welcome with his old rank, in his old spot, as if he never left. He had stuck by the guild during rough times, and the guild was returning the favor.

My guild had an enhancement shaman. With a Sulfuras, which was awarded to him by the same guild. (You must realise that during vanilla WOW, a raiding enhancement shaman was more of a rarity than the actual legendary.) We even had a second one. We had an elemental one, too. We had a demonology warlock. We had arms and fury warriors. All of these were specs that no sane raiding guild would recruit at the time, yet my guild had them on their roster – the leaders being of the mind that the person behind the character is much more important than the character itself.

In exchange for the required donations to the bank, we got flasks, high end enchanting materials, and various recipes upon request. We were always required to do the best we could, on our own, nothing less was expected – but when we couldn’t, the guild bank was there to help.

Raid signups were on the website every week for the entire week. We would be expected to only sign for raids we were absolutely sure we could make, as soon as we humanly could. In exchange, lineups were often finalized one day in advance, at the latest a couple of hours before the raid – our leadership realised that those who were not chosen would want to know ahead of time so that they could plan their night differently. Those who sat out were not expected to be present at raid time. Notes of who had to sit out were kept, to ensure the rotation was fair.

I come from a guild culture like this. A guild where the members obeyed the rules laid out and made everything run smoothly. In exchange, we got more than a raid every night – we got an atmosphere where we were respected and loved as individuals and treated fairly. We had a 40-man raiding guild where the majority of the members were in harmony, and those that weren’t didn’t last long anyway.

My guild was not a nameless, faceless entity – it was the quiet rogue I lent some Greater Eternals to, it was my arrogant, talented demo warlock friend, it was the amazingly skilled mage officer who got our first 8/8 T2. It was the boisterous hunter with the Scottish accent, the bouncy Pakistani shaman, and the French mother of one. My guild was those people whose company I genuinely enjoyed, and those I meant something to as a person.

The guild was not perfect, but the basic premise was simple: Give effort and respect, and get effort and respect in return, no matter what your position in the guild.

In this case, again, it is all about respect. I found the guild’s attitude towards its members extremely disrespectful. If I commit my time and effort to raiding, I would like to know in advance whether I’m in or out. If I have to sit out for a boss once in a while because the encounter is undefeatable otherwise, no problem. Just let me know when I will be needed back. Doing it any other way implies that the members’ time is somehow not valuable.

I can’t imagine agreeing to all these conditions that everyone who plays the game and deems themselves fit to raid agree to. I can’t think of myself in yet another guild, fulfilling my end of the agreement, with the guild barely attempting to fulfill theirs. I can’t fathom being in a guild where I’m just another priest who’s expendable if something better happens to log on, damn the loyalty I’ve shown.

But most of all, I could not understand my friend’s matter of fact demeanor, the way he looked down on me when he said “With this attitude, how will you find a better guild?”. Is this really the norm? Is this really what the current raiding scene is like? Shall I just give up and throw in the towel, because I will never find a guild “with this kind of attitude” – because apparently, having expectations from your guild besides “ok, kill these bosses and gief me epix” is not acceptable? Why is it that most guilds etch their requirements into the brains of their members but don’t bother to treat them as something slightly more valuable than dirt?

When I join a guild, I am willing to not only offer my services as a priest or a druid, but also respect, dedication, loyalty, maturity, understanding and friendship. These things are what many guilds out there claim they look for, and what every truly good player should be able to provide. And any guild, if they aspire to be a truly good guild, should perhaps consider that the price tags on such things are not simply a few epics, but much, much more.

Moonky and I were just chilling in some  late night AVs and discussing Cataclysm with regard to the casual/hardcore debate in /g. The discussion led itself to a few interesting points.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that as far as the casual debate was concerned, Blizzard had it right in TBC and Wrath was a step in the wrong direction.

To start this, of course we gotta define casual.

There is this common opinion that casual means someone who doesn’t raid, and hardcore is someone who raids. This seems to follow from the train of thought that says: “If you can afford to spend long blocks of time in the game, you naturally start raiding.”

Except, this is not true – there are a lot of people who devote hours to the game without doing any progression raiding. And I simply cannot say that you are playing a game casually if you log on every day for a couple of hours.

The player I could call casual would be someone who logged on for a few hours every week to do whatever they like. They can’t or aren’t willing to spend more than an hour or so in the game at a time. They aren’t willing to spend time outside of the game reading about how to play the game. They took four or five months just getting to the level cap. They purchased the expansion a month after it hit. They just want to log in, have some fun doing whatever they like, log out.

Due to time constraints, the casual player can’t afford to, or just doesn’t like to, engage in extended group play. Raids are definitely out from their POV. 5-mans are occasional. That leaves them with questing or PVP for character progression. And as we all know, there is a very firm ceiling as far as quested gear is concerned.

This leaves a single option for the truly casual player to progress their character: PVP.

In TBC, this was fine and dandy – PVP gear was readily available. Anyone could put in a few hours of work here and there, and still end up with something to show for it. This is why Blizzard got it right for the “casuals” in TBC. They could queue for a battleground, join up, participate, obtain some good gear without needing to rely on other people, or having to devote large chunks of time at once. Every season, the gear was upped in quality, so there was still something new to strive for, something else that would make you remain competitve.

This changed in Wrath.

Wrath caters more to the “hardcore casual”. The people who log in every day. The people who can afford to spend big blocks of time ingame, but somehow don’t want to or cannot be part of an organized PVE effort. What Wrath did was make raiding easier, so that people did not need to be part of anything organized – it didn’t solve the time problem.

However, it did take away the casual’s real route to gear progression. All the PVP gear is either rated, has a prohibitively high cost for its quality, or requires you to be online at a certain time in a certain place much like raiding. The PVP gear obtained can, with a few exceptions, no longer be used in competitive PvE because of the stat changes and the heavy resilience weighting.

Most importantly, the single greatest slot, weapons, are currently rated, forcing people to participate in the arena metagame and be good at it. Again, your casual doesn’t have the time or the inclination to do that.

If Blizzard really wanted to keep the real casuals playing, Wrath was the wrong direction for that. The casual/hardcore debate in Wrath is meaningless from that point of view, because there is very little in this expansion that actually caters to the casuals. It’s all aimed at the hardcore casual, and it’s succeeding.

Going with that train of thought, was there any need for the stat-dumbing-down that was announced in Blizzcon? The hardcore casual is already willing to spend time outside of the game to improve themselves. I doubt that the change will make a lot of difference for the true casual, who doesn’t have access to that level of play to begin with – the level where decisions such as these would matter.

The change(s) won’t motivate the casuals to take part in raiding, because they lack the one thing Blizzard can’t give them, and that’s time. Sure, they can do a few instances a week, and get a piece of T8,5… in six weeks? Eight? Assuming they persist, which a lot of people won’t, because the length of time needed for the gear is discouraging, especially for a casual who had been playing during TBC.

Add to this the fact that the (very player-created) entry threshold is high for most content, both PVE and PVP. Technically, you might be able to clear every heroic in your fresh level 80 quest greens. In reality, unless you are above the actual entry threshold by a healthy margin, you’ll be refused entry by your PUG. PVP is worse – watch yourself get steamrolled for hours while you collect the some 60,000 honor needed for a single piece of gear.

The casual, in theory, can slowly work towards their goals. However, to gain entry into heroics, they must at least turn to craftables. Gathering the materials or gold takes time. After spending a few weeks gathering those, then you’ll be allowed to go into heroics, and maybe get badges for yet another item, that will take yet longer. The prospect of spending so much IRL time leaves people with two choices: Spend more time ingame, or just stop playing altogether because the motivation is lost. For most casuals who are unable or unwilling to dedicate more to the game, the choice is simple.

To actually cater to the casual – improve the quality of PVP, because that is the only group activity in the game where the player needs to pass no player-created threshold to play within a group, and does not require devoting large blocks of time at once. Bring back the TBC PVP system. Remove rating requirements from all arena gear (”Matches that take five minutes each, ten of them a week, progress towards a piece of high quality gear? Sign me up!”). In short, make PVP a truly viable avenue for the casual to pursue for gear progression.