Raid repair step 1: new invites policy
You know, I never saw this as an issue before this post by Cranky Healer opened my eyes, but my guild’s raid invites system sucks. We’re in the second grouping, the “show up and maybe you’ll get an invite” sort of guild. Which worked for a while, but there are several structural deficiencies with such a system that I think have been partly causing our attendance troubles.
For one, we have no idea if a raid will be good to go until about 10 minutes before start time when everyone is logged on. Moreover, while people who come to every raid can reasonably assume they’ll have an invite, those that seldom get taken along tend to just assume they won’t be invited and don’t bother to show up and be available for raid. Lastly, the “surprise” nature of invites makes it hard to reasonably rotate people so that we have an ideal distribution of folks seeing the content and getting the gear.
The new system that we’re adopting next week is based on Cranky Healer’s guild’s system. It’ll work like this:
- All 25man raids go up on the calendar one month ahead of time
- Everyone is to go through and sign up for every raid they can make.
- The Sunday before the first night of the raid week (ie, Tuesday), Demo and I will go through the sign up list and mark 25 people as confirmed and 5 as standby.
- Both “Confirmed” and “Stand By” are expected to show up, with the folks on stand by getting 100% of the dkp earned that night as compensation for being on and available for the duration of the raid.
Ideally no one will be on stand by for two weeks in a row. There’ll be some rotation to get some new faces in every week so we have a larger core of geared people ready to fill spots.
I think this new system will do a lot of good in encouraging wider participation and attendance.
Tonight is farm night so I’m sure attendance will be fine. The real test will be how progression night looks next week after I implement this.
Armory Feed
Nice write up, I need to bring this up with our RL and GM. We’ve had a few gquits from thing like this. We are a casual leveling guild(wish we weren’t, but not my guild) with a few of us being more progression raiders, but still casual in our amount of time. We having been running 2 ICC10s, but people have gotten mad they dont get in the first group(its generally the better group) and then they gquit.
The problem with posting one month ahead is that anyone that joins in that one month lead up will not get an automatic invite for level or rank-based raids posted in calendar.
In my guild we have a minimum raiders’ rank that we send invites out to to prevent non-80s and social members from cluttering up the raid. It also gives our junior members something to work towards.
All of the points above except for point One above look fine. Good luck!
Our raid does it somewhere in between — we have signups every week, and usually by the day before raid, we know what our roster is, and we have one or two people on standby. Our core of regulars is, well, pretty regular, so we don’t have a lot of subbing, but we also have a core of subs who can probably guess, “well, if Teu isn’t in, I’ll likely be raiding that day”, or “if that mage isn’t there, they’ll probably call me”. I do like the idea of DKP raids offering full DKP to standby subs; I think that’s a nice touch. (Our raid doesn’t use DKP, so we have no equivalent there, but it’s a neat idea.)
This is one place where I think an out-of-game communication system — whether it be out-of-game chat/email or even just my raid leader being able to text me — would be shiny. If I were a sub, I might be totally willing to hop online and fill in for a raid, even at the last minute, but I might not want to be hanging out in-game so I can sub in at a moment’s notice — maybe I want to rent a movie or read a book or something. Maybe I just got Bioshock 2 and, if I’m not going to be raiding, I’d rather be playing a totally different game, so I don’t want my computer tied up with WoW if I’m not in the raid. Dropping something to go raid would be less of a problem for me than having to sit online waiting to find out if I have a spot.
Of course, that doesn’t work when queues are an issue. *ahem* But I do think the new Battle.net system, if it allows for chat between people who are in and out of game, will really help communication, especially last-minute communication. I’m hopeful, anyway!
Good luck with your roster difficulties! I hope you find a system that works out well for you!
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Glad you got something out of my post :) As things go on you may have to tweak how far in advance you confirm people (we only confirm 24 hours in advance) or how far in advance you post guild events (we do 2 weeks at a time)… but that will be something you figure out based on the needs of YOUR guild.
A tool I’ve found useful for tracking attendance with large raids is world of logs. If you upload your combat logs faithfully, there’s a tab you can click which shows a spreadsheet of attendance going back quite a ways. Very useful. (On the left hand side, there’s your guild name, and on the drop down menu click “raids by character.)
@Anafielle
23 February 2010 at 5:37 pm #
Huh. Sounds like that will work! A defined system is probably all you need to clean things up :)
Yah, a month sounds early. My RL sends out invites every sat or sun for that week.
We have a more casual/social sort of guild with much spottier attendance, but no desire to require attendance from everyone.. we like being casual but focused. This is how we do it:
We have 2 raiding ranks – raider and social raider. Raider is based on attendance and performance. They show up almost every day, they generally get out of fire, and they generally beat tank DPS. Then, people who commit to only 1 or 2 days a week, who are newer, etc are “social raiders.”
On raid night, the RL invites all the raiders signed up. Then he invites social members to fill out the raid until it is full. Sometimes I’m sure he turns down social raiders; sometimes our attendance is so poor (more often than not, lately) that we can’t fill a raid at all.
What we appear to struggle with – besides way too small a small pool of raiders to draw from (omg recruiting ><) – is that we hurt when attendance fluctuates even a bit. Really, really hurt.
My guild used to put up the runs one month ahead of time as well, however we found that it often had the effect that people would sign up for everything, and when the time got to actually run it, many forgot what they signed up for 3 weeks earlier.
Currently we put up runs 7-10 days in advance and that works well for us. It also give the Raid leaders a little flexibility if a run should be on a Saturday or a Sunday.