Pushing your guild to the next level

[Kazdane]

My guild is a little under a year old. It's a very new guild, in a server where progression is not exactly top-notch (no Algalon 25 kills yet, nor any Glory of Ulduar Raider 25, either, and of course, no kills in Coliseum 25 HC).

To give you a little background, we turned into a 25-man raiding guild right after Ulduar launched. And we've done rather well up until now trying to catch-up the rest of guilds in the server. We survived the summer season while progressing through Ulduar normal, but now, here's where the dillema comes:

Looking at normal progression, only Yogg is left (we've been working on him but decided to focus first on Coliseum to grab some gear from there), and then, every hard mode. However, after analyzing the performance of my raid members, I've noticed that, as I expected, we have players that are not putting in the effort that some others do. Now, I'll give them that some of them have increased their play, and raid performance has gone (DPS-wise) from a mere 55k raid-wide dps in Anub'arak two weeks ago to 75k-85k raid-wide dps and pretty much every raid member doing at least over 4k DPS and a few on the realm of 6k DPS, yea, I know, it's not astonishing, but I don't think it's that bad either if you keep in mind that we're playing sort of catch-up to the raiding guilds that have been focused on 25-man raiding right since WotLK came out.

So, now, our objective, is, obviously, hard mode/heroic progression. I don't expect Yogg to give us much trouble since we're already doing well in P2 and it's just a matter of improving our play. But, looking at hard modes, I know some of my guildies will have to step their game a notch. And here's where the doubts come:

Should we try to recruit new players (something not easy keeping in mind that we're usually the best 6-7th guild Horde-side) or motivate our existing players into improving their game and kick those that are just not interested in putting the effort to learn their class?

We don't mind players learning to play, and we've seen a few of them doing that in our raids. But there's some others that won't improve no matter what you do. And some of our more experienced/better raid members, are losing their motivation to raid since they don't feel we're gonna be able to tackle any hard modes anytime soon.

For further clarification, I'm GL, RL and MT of my guild, so I pretty much have the ability to bring any idea I want to my guild.

What are the experiences of other fellow RL/GLs out there when you were faced with this issue? Should we renew our roster by recruiting new (more capable?) players, or should we try to stick with what we have and hope they do improve their play?

[Griff]

Underperforming players is are something we wrestled with a lot in our guild. THe biggest piece of advice I could offer is that things just don't happen by themselves. If you've got underperforming players, take a look at what they are doing and try to identify where they are falling short and then work with them in a constructive way to try to solve those problems. Good raiders will always been looking for ways to improve and will take suggestions to heart while others will be butthurt.

Its also good to have people working to earn raid spots, having a few folks available to step in if someone's really not carrying their fair share of the water during a raid can be a powerful incentive but be careful about recruiting as I think too much turnover in personnel tends to discourage feelings of loyalty to the guild and its membership in your raiders.

As for yogg, the key to the fight is the portal team - the faster they are, the less tentacles lurk menacingly upstairs. If you can get your portal folks to the brainroom with 40+ seconds to spare, you can probably do it in two portals/3 crushers. A yogg kill can do wonders for guild morale.

[Khue]

When we have issues with certain raid members we do the following:

1. Have a sit down with them and chat about where they are at
2. Discuss with them why "where they are at" isn't "where they are expected to be"
3. Outline a plan on how they can reasonably close the gap, not completely, but enough to show progress
4. When they fail, explain to them why they are no longer garenteed a raid spot
5. Recruit, when a recruit becomes better at their position then they are, they officially lose their raid spot.

There are some people that just simply won't make the change. These people are detrimental to your raid progression. Even though they might be "nice people," if they are holding up your progress, they need to go. It's not a personal issue. You can't disappoint 24 other people because one person doesn't fill their obligations.

[Splug]

In a utopian scenario, the purge-and-rebuild methodology will result in a stronger guild. In the end you do not desire to carry dead weight, and the faster you can get to a point where everyone is playing at a top-notch level, the better off you'll be.

Unfortunately, that's not realistic. Recruiting new players is not a trivial matter: the only way to see if someone fits in with your raid environment is to bring them into it. It may take a couple weeks for players to show their true ability or inability as well. Simply cutting away players and replacing them without detailed inspection of the recruits only serves to trade known issues for unknown ones. Moreover, if you over-purge, you run the risk of starving out your raid roster, and this leads to stagnation or collapse.

Improving the resources you have available is thus a much safer solution. Continue recruiting, and slowly phase out those who refuse to improve. While there is always a fear of breaking the system by a guildkick creating a chain reaction, in my experience I've seen far more people respond with "about fucking time" than complaints. Don't create more openings than you can fill quickly, and don't recruit benchwarmers. Undercutting the roster creates starvation, overloading it encourages apathy and poor attendance. Changing the status quo is always a risky move, and you have to ask yourself: is it worth possibly losing everything?

There are some non-optimal legacy players who linger in top-100 guilds. The encounters can be done, even at a high end, propping a few people up. The expectation should not be to remove the problem, but to reduce it to as much a minority as possible. Do not expect an overnight change; this is the kind of thing that can take months to develop, and a full progression reset to realize. Your goal should not be to surge to the #1 spot by the start of Icecrown, but to keep up with the top progression tier when the next expansion kicks off.

-Splug

[Kazdane]

As for yogg, the key to the fight is the portal team - the faster they are, the less tentacles lurk menacingly upstairs. If you can get your portal folks to the brainroom with 40+ seconds to spare, you can probably do it in two portals/3 crushers. A yogg kill can do wonders for guild morale.

Hey Griff, thanks for the advice, especially in this part. We got him down pretty easy in 10-man (due to the gear of course) and we noticed there that as you say most of p2 depends on how well your brain team performs. They've got 2 of the rooms (SW and IC if memory serves me correctly) were they usually get the stun in under 20 seconds, though they're still polishing how to clean the OS room quickly enough.

I wanted to thank you all for the advices, I agree that we should keep ourselves at realistic levels (in fact we're not really aiming to be server #1), and we try to do that as much as possible, though I want the players to motivate themselves to do Algalon, Yogg+0, Coliseum hc, etc. Even if it's a carrot too distant to pick it up, I believe it should motivate our people to keep moving forward.

In the end, what we want is to avoid the risk of not being appealing to new recruits or the guild going to waste just because we're one of so many out there in our server that people just won't take us seriously.