What Warlords Did to Guilds

8/10H thanks to random pugs and lots of perseverance

My guild has been through a lot since Warlords came out, but after finally being able to relax for a minute, I realized that it's not just my guild that's suffering - Warlords' new raid system set up has had a widespread, far reaching effect on the vast majority of guilds.

As we know, Warlords removed 10 and 25 mans as a thing and replaced all difficulties with flexible roster numbers, except for mythic, which is exclusively 20 - a number Blizzard probably looked at as a 'happy medium', and a solution to the 10 vs. 25 drama.

The problem now is that there's a large number of small guilds that need to recruit for 20 man rosters and not enough potential recruits to go around. Every 10 man guild from Mists is looking to bring on 10 or more new people just to reach mythic content, but there are nowhere near that many recruits looking to join new guilds. It's not like 25 man guilds had to shed any of their members - those extra five people simply had to compete for their spots and the losers likely stayed in their guilds to warm the benches. The result of the 20 man "happy medium" was that 10 man guilds were expected to scrounge for a minimum of 10 more people, while 25 man guilds had to do nothing.

written out it's something like this

Why Our Merger Didn't Work

As I posted about previously, our guild attempted to merge with another guild awhile back which totally failed. It's been awhile since the implosion and I think I've realized why it didn't work out. If you missed it, I wrote about it three times - before it happened, after the initial merge, and the aftermath, including a follow-up of our guild's state after the calamity - or you can read my expositional summary below!

once upon a time...

The Never-Ending Guild Trial

sigh

Well, the merger didn't work out. If you were any of the people I talked to about it, feel free to say that you told me so. To be honest, I was never totally sure it was going to be okay.

There were times when it felt like it was working out, but as reassuring as it felt, I was always aware of the unseen action in the background, the unspoken feelings, and the clear disinterest of several members in meshing together and becoming one.

We had weak links on both sides from the merger, but honestly a lot of the troubles had to do with poor organization and decision making. We would say, oh we're only bringing the best, then invite everyone who was online. Then say, oh we're going to cut the weakest members and tighten up this raid, and then we'd go four more attempts without doing anything about anyone. We'd say, we shouldn't waste anymore time on this boss, let's go somewhere else, and then not go anywhere.

We all knew what should have happened, but it seemed like everyone thought it was someone else's job.

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.

The Rebuilding Phase

So far, so good - almost a week later and we haven't lost anymore members, got a few applicants, and even have a potential guild merger on the table.

what!?

Guild mergers are scary. Recruiting people is one thing. Starting a new guild is one thing. But taking two full guilds - two websites, two GMs, two entire officer teams, four tanks, too many healers - and smushing them together is an entirely different thing. However, we are one boss away from hitting mythic and, being behind the general populace of mythic raiders, recruitment might end up being tough. Merging might be a necessity rather than an option.