The Trial of the Guild Merger

1/7M!

This post is a day late because, well, I couldn't think of what to write about. This last week or so, I had been talking about a possible guild merger with another guild on our server. I had a busy past weekend, but after the work I did, the other officers and GM finalized things for us and we collaborated to practice for the merger by raiding together this week.

We cleared 6 bosses on heroic in quick time and practiced on Imperator, downing him our second raid night after three attempts. We had met after the raid yesterday to compose a mythic team, which we took with us to M Kargath, which we also downed last night.

The other guild was happy with us and our progress so we voted on a new guild name and we merged last night. It's pretty exciting, but there is a lot of work to do replacing the old name, getting us all in one place, organizing our roles and responsibilities, and just settling down together under one tag.

Nothing is ever perfect, and though I look toward our progress and new mythic roster with optimism, I am wary. While the progress is nice, some people are being left out. A mythic roster has exactly 20 people, unlike the flexibility of heroic, and we agreed to cut the worst performers to form the most optimal team. This left out some people who have been raiding with us for awhile.

The thing is - we already told them this could happen - of course, I think they thought it would be under different circumstances, which is where I think some animosity grows. Regardless of the way you describe it, "our people" were sat for these "newcomers," and that doesn't feel good to them. It would be different if these people had all been applicants to our guild that melded with us and became part of our family, but it was "another guild's people," and perception is key.

the perception is disappointment

Like I have said before, progression raiding guilds by their nature are not conducive to a family. People come and go, and it doesn't matter how good of friends you are or how much gold you've donated, if you aren't performing up to standards necessary to down bosses, you get sat. Entering into Warlords, we wanted to approach raiding as a serious, progression oriented guild. We posted detailed, in depth threads about how we would be monitoring performance and making calls to sit and rotate people based on progression needs for bosses.

Of course, the thing is, no one ever thinks that person is going to be them - and a guild merger wasn't very expected. Rather than being sat for better performing guild members, people instead feel they're being unfairly matched up against other people, but the thing is, the guild we merged with was right where we were in progress. I regularly sigh with disbelief when I inspect another balance druid that I've been outdpsing and see that they're 10 or 12 ilvls higher than I am, so what 'unfair advantage' do these other guild members have? Maybe I'm being too harsh.

We are going to regularly have opportunities to gear up and re-trial all of our members for mythic spots, and spots aren't being granted on DPS/HPS alone - damage taken and performance of mechanics are considered as well as comparing players to themselves rather than to other players. It doesn't feel good to tell your friends that they aren't performing up to par, but it's something I've had to deal with in a progression oriented setting multitudes of times.

I'm excited about our roster being big enough to run mythic, I'm excited to finally get things on track and pretty excited to be an integral part of piecing together a new guild, but sitting some of my friends and loyal guild members is tugging on my heart. Hopefully we can organize quickly to give people the tools and resources they need to prove themselves and earn their spots fairly.