The Twin Blades of Bigger Raids

My guild is a pretty small guild, relatively. We do 10-man raids, and we do 5-mans, but that's about it in terms of actual game content. We try to organize ourselves for two nights every week, with no requirements whatsoever. If we can't get a raid together, then people do dailies, get 5-mans together, or do real life things. Some of our members are fairly creative and come up with what have been termed "Mageroyal Spectacular" events. These have included streaking across Azeroth, Steamtonk tournies, the Gnoob Gnome Run (in which each team consists of two high-level toons and a level 1 gnome, and the teams race to a designated spot), etc.

This is just to give you an idea of how casual our guild is. We are a group of friends, and we do have members that don't raid. We'll rip on each other about our play styles sometimes, but it's all in good fun, and that's understood. And it's great. I love my guild. I have turned down several invites to larger raiding guilds, just because my guild is awesome.

That said, we also kick some serious ass at the content that we do. Our members are well-informed, learn quickly, adapt to any situation well, and work well together. It has been said that our guild motto is "Casual schedule, hardcore execution." And I'd say that's about right. This gets people excited about getting to level 70, and raiding with us. So the guild has been growing slowly but surely, and recently we've found ourselves with 20+ members online during guild nights. We rarely get more than one raid going, but we get at least one, plus a 5-man, and some alt-action.

This revelation has also spawned some discussion about seeing if we can get a Gruul's or Mag's run together. We counted up the actual number of people we have that want to raid, and we have 23. PuGging two is not bad, I'd say. And it gets me and my fully-epic'd, well-enchanted, well-gemmed tank quite excited.

It is a double-edged sword, however. When we started raiding as a guild, we were warned that it would shift us more toward the hardcore end of the casual/hardcore spectrum, which, I'd say, is true. We have to decide who gets to go on this week's Kara run, and though people will step down a lot of the time, there are times when slots are rolled for. When we decide we're doing ZA, it's much more strict than that. The officers basically look at who's geared for it, and what classes we need, and decide whether or not we can
do ZA that week, and tell us who is getting into ZA.

Now, since we have less than 25 people, the "getting in" part will not be an issue, though scheduling may be, as we need an afternoon/night when everyone is available. But the fights will also take more coordination, and only a few people in the guild have done the fights (with other guilds). So, in order to progress, the casual players who don't want to read about fights will either be forced to read about them, or we'll have long and complicated explanations followed by several frustrating wipes due to the inevitable mistakes made by one of the 25 that are in the raid (it happens, we all know this).

I think the players are skilled enough to handle it, I just hope the gap between our most hardcore players and our most casual players won't cause too much drama. If there is drama, I think the real-life relationships will be enough to hold the guild together, but I hope it doesn't change us too much.

Note to self: People won't read this long of a post. Be more concise.