(Sorry for the lack of editing and links. With life the way it is, I’d rather get this out now than spend the next few weeks intermittently editing it and then finding it outdated when it’s ready to be published.)

There are a number of people who used to read my blog who have asked if I will ever continue to write. Technically, the answer to that question is “yes.” I do have a manner of important things to say concerning Wrath of the Lich King, its raid content, the future of the game, the nature of the MMO industry, what the future holds for me, etc.

But to expect any sort of regularity in content is probably out of the question. First of all, leading a hardcore guild is in gamer speak “serious business.” Doing so between taking classes full-time and working a couple jobs is even more strenuous. Finding the time to sit down and even write about a game while maintaining any level of normalcy between my obligations would be impossible. But the complexities of why I haven’t been able to find time deserve to be addressed.

Wrath’s Initial Content Did Not Help Existing Hardcore Guild Leaders Transition Easily

The first reason why I could hardly find time to write concerns the nature of the game’s raiding content itself. For a guild transitioning from TBC to Wrath, the path was extraneous given the tools the game provided.

As with any transition between expansions, a guild is going to lose members to that fabled realm reality. Which means a guild leader will have holes to fill with new players. Unfortunately, however, tier seven was hardly challenging, making the process of replacing people arduous and uncertain.

Naxxramas is a relic of “old content.” Many people look back on it fondly, as they should, but it was designed to be the last tier of vanilla content, not the first tier of a third expansion. So it had many problems. Consider that each encounter only has maybe one or two gimmicks, a primary feature of “classic” content. By comparison, encounters in TBC usually had a few or several gimmicks, except for maybe Attumen, but he’s a special flower.

Consider further that most of Naxxramas’ “gimmicks” are now outdated. So when you nerf them into the ground on the premise that Naxxramas is supposed to be entry level, you get a raid dungeon that becomes much easier than even Karazhan was. This is hardly a prime environment in which to test new members.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Sartharion with three drakes alive, and five-minute (and then six-minute) Malygos provided some challenge–Sartharion as a situational awareness and cooldown check, Malygos as a minor-grade DPS check. And you could definitely use Thaddius to weed out people who couldn’t do something as simple as switching sides on a debuff change. But when you only have a few encounters which highlight people’s mistakes, it’s difficult to distinguish between typical mistakes anyone can make on a bad night, and someone who plays consistently terrible.

In a nutshell, there wasn’t enough challenging content to adequately evaluate players to determine whether or not they were good.

Potential Recruits Were Complacent

Because the initial content in Wrath was easy, many awesome players were also content to remain in mediocre guilds. Afterall, any guild with half a clue could clear Naxxramas and the easy version of Sartharion. Malygos was a moderate challenge, but only moderate. And then Sartharion with two drakes proved doable for even subpar guilds.

This provided ample access to all available loot for anyone in an average guild. So why would they apply to guilds with higher standards when they can get the gear they need and potentially have a better shot at it given established reputations and DKP? Simply answered, they wouldn’t. And I certainly noticed.

What Recruits You Did Pick Up Were Usually Mediocre or Came with Baggage

Basically, the breadth of our applications came from people who were one or more of the following:

1. Unguilded.
2. Knew someone in the guild already.
3. Were tired of dealing with mediocre players.

For number one, this often included people who had taken breaks from the game. A new expansion is an optimal time for people to return to the game, afterall. Unfortunately, this meant a lot of people applying were either inclined to get bored of the game or to have real life intrude. Now, there’s nothing wrong with the latter. It happens. But when a high percentage of your applicants are susceptible to such conditions, it makes it frustrating to find long-term players who will be around for at least six months.

For number two, you’re never guaranteed to find someone who is actually good enough to be in a hardcore guild. Friends, relatives and significant others are often biased and will do and say anything to be able to play with their partners in crime. I’ve seen this happen several times, now.

For number three, sometimes this condition is paired with a bad attitude. The type of person who can’t accept that even good players sometimes make mistakes. I’ve seen this several times, now. And I’m not going to lie and say we don’t already have some temperamental players who occasionally get upset over mistakes that are going to be typical in any guild.

Simply put, you’d be hard-pressed to find guilds ranked between 15th and 50th in the U.S. who play perfectly. If there was, they wouldn’t be ranked 15th through 50th. They’d be number one. Because if all it took them was exposure to the mechanics, they’d defeat each one devoid of random mechanics in merely a couple hours (and a few of them sooner). Which would likely outpace Ensidia. Which would make them number one in the world. So people need to get it into their fucking heads that it’s just not going to happen. If that’s what they want, they should apply to Premonition, or move to fucking Europe and join Ensidia. And even then, they both raid grotesque hours to get their world firsts, and they don’t play perfectly on every attempt.

So when you have a lot of these types of applicants, it becomes very difficult to retain good and reasonable players. Of all the people we recruited in tier seven content, only two people remain as a full-time raiders. And that’s saying something, because as a guild we’re currently ranked number 53rd in the U.S. We have six of the ten hard modes down (if you count Algalon as a hard mode).

I highly suspect these issues are what have caused guilds like Might, vodka, V A N Q U I S H, etc. to slip far behind in the ranks. During tier seven, you were simply lucky if you could find just a few genuinely good players.

Early Raiding Achievements Were Frustrating

Tier seven had some annoying achievements required for Glory of the Raider.

The Dedicated Few and Subtraction are just retarded. When you’re trying to gear people up, sitting people for an entire raid so others can get the achievement or running two different Naxxramases, one heavy on alts, is aggravating. Especially when one of them comes close to Immortal and fails at it because you needed one of your stronger players to even have a chance at completing the other 20-man Naxx.

I like the concept of And They Would All Go Down Together, but it provides no reward other than potentially completing the meta and getting a drake.

Denyin’ the Scion was just fucking stupid.

The Immortal was perhaps the most frustrating of all. It was, essentially, part skill, part luck, and partly based on the quality of your applicants. Let’s be clear: attrition happens. So when you have 23 people and need to trial a couple people, it’s difficult to evaluate them when you need to sit them out because you don’t want to ruin an Immortal attempt. And doubly frustrating when the reason you fail is because you think they’re awesome based on their Sartharion performance, but then it turns out they can’t do the jump on Thaddius and then ruin the attempt by running into a group while uncharged. Or just fail on the charges.

Immortal was frustrating also when normally good players ruin attempts by doing stupid things. Like thinking they can line of sight the mana bomb on Kel’Thuzad. Or trying to push DPS too much on Sapphiron instead of playing it safe with ice blocks. Or failing to notice where they’re standing for something. Or missing a heal on Kel’Thuzad’s frost blast.

Those were reasons we never got Immortal. We came to Kel’Thuzad ready to get it I think four times and failed each time. A few other attempts failed because of disconnects. A few failed to priest problems on Razuvious (problems I don’t think we’d have today), before we realized you could soft reset the dungeon and still have a shot at Immortal if you did Razuvious first. A couple failed to Grobbulus bugging out and spraying the raid as he turned to inject someone. And a few failed to recruits failing on charges on Thaddius after we thought they’d be able to handle that situation given their performance elsewhere.

And then some were just mistakes any good player may occasionally make. For example, we had one person who’d been in the guild for two years make a single mistake, which ended an Immortal run early. Though, honestly, it was still in December, so I don’t know we would have done Sapphiron or Kel’Thuzad cleanly. But my point is that in the past two and a half years, he’s made maybe three noticeable mistakes. If that. So if a player that good can make a mistake, anyone can.

What complicated the matter even further is that normally mediocre guilds were getting Immortal. So when one slightly above average guild on our server got it, suddenly people were saying “Lunacy is no longer number one.” Right, okay. Even though we got server firsts on the 10 and 25-man versions of Twilight Zone, Malygos and You Don’t Have an Eterinity, we were suddenly number two, then number three, etc. We were the only guild to even do five-minute Malygos when it was still five minutes. But somehow, people were now better than us in the eyes of some rather uneducated imbeciles (a few of whom commented on this blog).

Unfortunately, that mindset also tended to creep into the thoughts of some in the guild. Because we had a couple people who were normally good players fail more than once on Immortal, and because good recruits were suddenly almost impossible to fine, they began to view the guild in general as mediocre and in decline. We even had one player who departed us return to say they were glad to see we were good again in Ulduar.

In reality, however, nothing was in decline. If anything, we’re stronger now than we were then. That’s not to say we don’t have holes to fill and problems to solve. Guilds always do. But we were never mediocre. We were never in decline. We just had some people make stupid mistakes, and we took dumb chances with some recruits. That doesn’t mean we weren’t going to be capable at competing when raid content again became difficult.

And it now shows. With Ulduar, we’re ranked 53rd in the U.S. On our usual twenty-hour raiding schedule. A couple of our hard mode kills were in the 40’s. But from November through April, I was frustrated in having to deal with unreasonable personalities and poor morale, on top of having recruitment problems, etc.

Life Is Primary, Blogging a Distant Last

On top of guild leadership, life has simply been busy and will only get busier. It has come to a point where I will have to step down from leading the guild in the near future. Anywhere between two months from now to a year.

I’m coming into the final year of my degree. However, if something comes up in life such as a major family death, that could lead to a year and a half. Simply put, I’ve taken studies far too casually to be content. I’m lucky to have one job, let alone two. One is part-time, and one freelance and unpredictable, but whatever pays tuition. However, I face the possibility that I won’t get a Cal Grant next year, which would help with tuition and allow me to shift some finances into my rent. If that doesn’t happen, I’m going to have to increase the amount of time I spend at work. Which means I will no longer be able to raid.

As it stands, I’m sacrificing blogging time for whatever work I can get. So this is why you don’t see me writing. And when I’m not working, I’m usually interviewing applicants, farming the gold I need to raid, or participating in 10-man Ulduar once I get home from work, because it contains a lot of BIS pieces for certain classes (including my own).

I’m Also Inclined to Change My Life’s Priorities and Hobbies

Simply put, the world is unpredictable. And while I definitely enjoy gaming as a hobby, spending twenty hours a week raiding, and probably twenty to forty dealing with guild-related issues has developed it into a full-time job. It was one I was willing to take on two and a half years ago, when I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life. But these days, things have changed.

Running was once a passion of mine. Right out of high school, I had aspirations of working to compete on an amateur level. Even though I wasn’t serious in high school about running as I could have been, I still did extremely well and built like a Kenyan or Ethiopian marathoner. But I never applied myself. So now as I’m getting closer to the prime age, I just want to take a shot at competing, if even merely on an amateur level. And I’d love to get into the ultra marathon scene. But the game eats into what free time I have to condition myself. So I’ve hit a plateau in my training, because I haven’t been able to do what’s necessary to go above and beyond: hill repeats out in the foothills everyday, more focus on my nutritional habits, balancing proteins and carbs to optimize muscle growth and development, etc. Having a raid in twenty minutes means settling for a quick fixing of mac and cheese with maybe a vegetable, or eating whatever family has cooked up and then rushing to raid.

On top of this, I aspire to write about topics other than games. Where I once had planned to study web development and then create a gaming news web site with a different flavor and treatment of its topics, that passion is no longer there. It’s a complicated topic and one I will likely address in my final entry of the blog. I realize this post is already long-winded enough, however. Regardless, my plan is to eventually enter an MFA program for creative writing at my university. And once that happens, I won’t have time for anything else. And it’s something I want to do more than anything.

Wowjutsu is an aberration. Its guild rankings for raiding are simply inaccurate. While Lunacy on Proudmoore has managed every realm first, minus the 25-man version of Naxxramas, it is ranked seventh on the realm according to Wowjutsu.

Compared to WoWProgress, Wowjutsu is a joke. It is highly inaccurate, and it has been since the release of Sunwell Plateau. It detects and registers pieces of loot weeks after people have picked them up. And despite the fact that the site can rip the dates of boss kills straight from the armory, it still registers the day a guild has killed a boss as the day its system detects the achievement or loot. And all the attempts I’ve made to have the administrator correct these specific inaccuracies have gone unheeded. Meanwhile, the administrators at WoWProgress work tirelessly to correct their mistakes and improve their site.

Guild rankings are important to many raiding guilds. Placing can be a big factor in drawing recruits to apply to a guild. So when a “guild ranking” site becomes inaccurate and does nothing or little to fix its problems, it fails to aid the WoW community and actually harms it. Therefore, I call on all raiders and WoW players to boycott Wowjutsu. Do not link to it in any medium. Do not speak of it with friends. Only mention it in a call to boycott the site. Instead, refer only to sites that are accurate and well-run.

It is our jobs as players to prop up the sites that service us best. Let’s not support those that fail to do what we expect. Especially if they are trying to make money with advertisements. People who can’t run a decent service don’t deserve a cent of the advertising money they make.

So I was gone for more than a week. There are numerous reasons why:

1. Shifting a hardcore raiding guild from one expansion to another is not easy.
2. Having your co-GM go casual because of real life can create administrative hurdles.
3. Thanksgiving
4. Work
5. School

Shifting Lunacy to a New Expansion

This expansion was the first in which I had to shift an existing guild from one expansion to the next (as a leader). In the other games I’ve played, this transition was always relatively simple. So I had no prior experience on which to develop my ideas, which hurt in the end. With Dark Age of Camelot, I was a casual player and didn’t much care about what a new expansion meant. Trials of Atlantis pretty much forced people to raid, but raiding was easy and you could simply brute force your way through it. And if you didn’t like Trials of Atlantis, you could simply reroll on a classic server. During the shift from WoW 1.0 to TBC, I was creating a guild from scratch, rather than preparing people for the shift and preparing for the loss of some people. And I wasn’t really around to see how my previous guild handled it.

This expansion was particularly interesting because it didn’t take long to level at all. The first person to 80 on our realm (from my guild) hit it in well less than two days. By comparison, I was the first person to 70 on Proudmoore in TBC, and it took me about double the time it took him to accomplish the realm first. People didn’t believe me when I said I would be 80 by the Monday after release, even though I had to work on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (albeit with two partial days). Sure enough, I was ready to raid by Monday morning. As were a handful of people in the guild. We tried to marathon the 10-man on Monday, but came up just short as it we raided into the wee hours of the morning.

The Mistake

One mistake I made was assuming that we wouldn’t be ready to raid the 25-man until Thursday. I also wanted to try running two Naxx-10’s and decided to wait until Wednesday for that. However, we clearly didn’t have what we needed to do two Naxx-10’s, so we essentially wasted Tuesday doing nothing but heroics. What we should have done was start Naxx-10 on Tuesday, finish it on Wednesday and then use that gear to work our way through Naxx-25 undermanned.

As a result of this mistake, we lost the server first on Naxx-25. Another guild raided something like 22 hours over two days to do it, while we were on off our raiding schedule. We got the server second on Sunday.

While we ended up losing, we realized a couple things:

1. This content is easy. Such that losing the server first on Naxx-25 is no big deal, as the content is akin to Zul’Aman. All we lost is a title.
2. We cleared it in less than half the time it took the guild that got the realm first. Actually, we cleared it in a third of the time. So that speaks well of the core of our guild.

That’s not to say there wasn’t any drama. Some people whined about losing the title. And another got melodramatic over the loss saying “shit is going to hit the fan.” My response was essentially that he has to view the situation realistically and abstain from overreacting. It wasn’t as though we had lost the server first on Malygos, afterall.

Rectifying the Mistake

I knew a realm first on Malygos was easily in our sights. We had all day Monday to work on it, and people who were familiar with the encounter already. In response to the member expressing his concerns after losing the realm first on Naxx-25, I simply said “We can get the server first on Malygos.” And I was damn confident in this, as we had no problem getting it on Malygos-10. That’s not to say our strategy for phase three was perfect, but it worked.

And, sure enough, we accomplished it easily.

Guild Leadership Changes

Not only was it difficult to transition Lunacy from one expansion to another, but it has been even more difficult to do so with my co-GM stepping down. I had to promote someone to help me lead the guild, and they are only just really settling into the position. And I’ve had to find another to help even out the load. This increased my workload about two-fold from the already hefty weight of managing the loss of members and change of classes some people desired.

I’ve had to transfer my guild’s domain and set up new hosting, which I am not quite done with, yet. I’ve had to figure out how to restructure the guild with personnel changes in mind. And I’ve had to worry about the funding involved, as I am a poor student. Also, I’ve had to juggle this between work and school. And Thanksgiving was fairly busy, as well.

So my guild isn’t quite where I want it to be. However, then again, the content now is so easy that I think it would have been an major accomplishment to improve given the number of guilds out there that raid five, six and seven days a week. It was like the second coming of the ZA race, only bigger and with the added requirement of leveling up. Who can log on first? Who can level first? Who can raid enough to beat everyone else on the simpler accomplishments?

This Race Was More About Numbers and Time; Skill Has Been Unheralded

The race for world and realm firsts at the beginning of this expansion was more about time and numbers, as opposed to skill. That’s not to say that skill wasn’t a factor, however. It most certainly was. But consider the merge of SK Gaming (a.k.a. Curse) and Nihilum to create Ensidia. What has this done for top-end raiding?

Most importantly, it allows the guild to share their members across multiple raids. And it is more than likely that every single one of their players is highly skilled and considered on nearly equal playing fields. What this means is that roster crossover doesn’t have much of an impact and you can man an A raid and B raid based on who gets the best drops.

Consider if this had happened in TBC. Suppose Nihilum and SK Gaming each get one pair of glaives for their rogues before Sunwell is released. (I realize Nihilum had poor luck, I’m speaking hypothetically.) Instead of just managing with one pair in a raid, or recruiting new rogues with glaives, they could instead place those two rogues in the same raid when Sunwell comes out. By doing so, they avoid recruiting new rogues, which takes time and comes without a guarantee of finding someone as skilled as they need. Instead, they can simply share their members and increase the possibility of one raid’s success, without having to extend too far beyond their current roster.

What’s interesting to note, however, is that it seems Ensidia overlooked the skill involved in the 10-man Twilight Zone. By all accounts, including my own, doing Sartharion with three drakes in the 10-man is more difficult than doing it in the 25-man. And Method actually beat them to this accomplishment. But while Method received a nice blurb about it on World of Raids, WoWProgress doesn’t recognize the accomplishment as part of raiding progress. So while Method got the world first on the 10-man Twilight Zone, they only have the 9th world ranking to show for it.

This highlights an increasing dilemma amongst the raiding world. WoWProgress has jumped on this, but only for the heroic version of “The Twilight Zone.” Achievements like “Heroic: A Poke in the Eye,” “The Immortal,” and “Heroic: You Don’t Have an Eternity” are equally deserving of recognition, if not moreso than Twilight Zone.

In my opinion, Might is unheralded as one of the best guilds in the world in terms of skill. But they only have a 57th world ranking on WoWProgress to show for it. That is honestly tragic when they are in the top five in the world to do some of the most difficult achievements in the game right now.

I Like Hard Modes; I Like Achievements; But Realm Firsts for Some of Them, Please

I like the fact that Blizzard has included a hard mode for Sartharion and achievements that are worth doing to obtain some recognition. And I think every new encounter should have some kind of hard mode that results in more or better gear, as it would allow hardcore guilds to separate themselves from guilds that simply brute force them. With this possibility, I am actually inclined to look at the current content in a better light. I was initially disdainful, until we put in some serious work on Sartharion with three drakes up. I think this is a good direction for raiding.

However, Blizzard needs to have the foresight to track realm firsts for some of these “hard modes” to give guilds the recognition they truly deserve. I feel quite confident that my guild is on track to get the realm first on the heroic version of “The Twilight Zone,” but we won’t get an announcement for it like we did when we killed him the first time with 19 fresh level 80’s.

This is a great direction. It just needs some refinement.

Ulduar Is Where It Truly Begins

Naxxramas is retreaded content. Sartharion, Malygos and Archavon are the only new content. And all three are jokes on the surface, as they should be at entry level. Guild progress right now is in an unimportant state, especially with the holidays also coming up. Ulduar is where the raiding game will truly begin. And it won’t end until Icecrown. Don’t discount guilds that cleared Sunwell, but got off to a slow start in Lich King. It says very little. Especially if they are doing well on the more difficult achievements.

Considering my role as a guild and raid leader, it is very important that I hit 80 as soon as possible. With schoolwork and actual work stacked on top of the obligation I have to my raiders, this means I must divert attention away from blogging for about a week. Unfortunately, this also means I will not finish part one of my series on developing a successful hardcore raiding guild before the release of Wrath. I was hoping to, but I was unhappy with the first draft and now I do not have the time to finish it before I get in my extra sleep before Wrath’s release.

If this was a paying gig, I would sacrifice some of my leveling time to finish it. Alas, it is not. And I have my own interests to look out for as much as my readers’. That said, I want to acknowledge the fact that a lot of you are thinking of or committed to leading your own hardcore raiding guild in Wrath. So I will summarize a few important points.

Make Sure You’re Ready to Lead a Hardcore 25-Man Raiding Guild

You need to understand there is a level of micromanagement required to play the game on a hardcore level. A guild would never have defeated M’uru if their approach was merely to fill gaps with moderately adequate players and then brute force it. You needed a certain amount of cumulative DPS to have any chance at all in defeating M’uru. And often times this was higher than people realized. 2K for all but shadow priests, ret paladins, and slightly undergeared balance druid was unacceptable (and, even then, you tended to sit your ret pallies because they coudn’t contribute as much as, say, a fifth heroism or another warlock). And while you may never see an encounter as difficult as M’uru or Kil’jaeden ever again, a hardcore guild will err on the side of caution and find players who can micromanage and do everything they need to improve.

The same is said for the formation of strategies. It’s one thing to follow someone’s strategy point-for-point, and it’s another to find people who can refine them or to refine them yourself. If you want to be efficient in your success, then you need to march to your own beat at times. There’s a reason a lot of raiders call Bosskillers “Bossguessers.” Sometimes the written strategies are not the best in general, nor the best for your guild specifically.

I don’t think you need previous leadership experience explicitly to run a hardcore raiding guild, but it does help. Personally, I was the leader of a top clan in a game called Nox for six months straight, then a player in a small clan that had no real leadership structure (because it was just four of the best players in Nox banding together to dominate the competition outright). While only a total of maybe 2000 people competed in the clan ladder every month, it was still a lesson in what was necessary to lead a successful group of gamers. And while competition for world firsts is not always the focus of some hardcore raiding guilds, competitive experience can give people the tools they need to lead and help improve a guild on a personal level.

That said, I think you need to have witnessed leadership styles that exist in MMO’s. This can be done either as a leader yourself or as an underling watching the leadership. If you’ve never played an MMO before, however, you will be unfamiliar with concepts such as DKP and probably lose members when you can’t answer the question, “Why do(n’t) we use DKP?”

Develop Your Ideas, Philosophies and Guild Structure Before You Create It

While it is certainly possible to create a successful hardcore raiding guild on a whim, I don’t advise it. It’s best to develop ideas and philosophies for your guild and set them in stone through the guild’s written rules and structure. Even if that means your written structure is to “have a loose structure that gives way for flexibility that might be necessary for [your] success.” Some top guilds have no written structure other than this agreement. But they are very, very rare and are almost always well-established with highly mature players (and anyone who can’t work in the system gets the boot).

That said, at least decide what sort of loot system you want. Decide the amount of time you want to raid and when. State the type of conduct you expect from your members. And declare your goals and intentions. If you are going to go for world firsts, say so. If you are aiming to merely create an efficient raid that places respectably, say so. If you’re merely hoping to create an efficient raid that can beat content, improve and have fun, say so.

People join and leave guilds based on their philosophies, schedules, loot systems, leaders and rules. If you do not clearly state how your guild operates or plans to operate, you can lose people or fail to attract recruits. Especially if your guild is new and has no progression ranking.

Establish Yourself, and Become a Visible Figure on Your Server

While not absolutely necessary, it does help your cause if you can either prove to be a promising leader or create some sort of publicity for yourself before you create your guild. The more people know you somehow, the more people will think about applying to your guild.

I did this by playing pretty much every part of the game. PvP. PvE. And by joining PUG raids and even leading my own PUG MC that managed to kill Ragnaros every week except two (out of ten). I also did this by racing to become the first 70 on Proudmoore during TBC (in which I was successful). This generated some publicity and showed how committed I was to the ideal of efficiency.

While such exploits do not always cause people to apply, they can help your cause.

When You Recruit, State Your Intentions

When you first recruit for your guild, make sure you clearly state what you intend your guild to be. If people want to join the top guild on the server, and you hope to overcome the competition to do so, say so. That’s what I did. And I don’t think we would have managed it if I hadn’t.

The same can be said if you don’t. Especially if you reside on a server that has one or more of the world’s top guilds. You can bet that if Premonition ever transferred to Proudmoore, I’d openly admit we don’t intend to compete with them. There’s just no way we could on a twenty-hour schedule.

Don’t Be a Prick!

I’ve seen a lot of hardcore progression guilds fall apart or drop out of the stresses of hardcore progression because their leaders are pricks. Very rarely do they reform and recoop from the ousting of a cantankerous dictator. There’s a good reason why Nihilum and SK Gaming rose to become number one in their respective times (and now they are merging, but that’s a different story).

Don’t make the same mistake! Your players will perform better if you’re not constantly yelling at them, or if you fail to approach your guild’s problems reasonably.

Have Fun! Or Find Satisfaction!

If you can’t have fun or find some satisfaction in leading a hardcore raiding guild, don’t do it. Plain and simple.

Wow. That turned into something that is almost what I wanted to say in my first two parts. I guess stress really is a part of writer’s block. Anyway, that’s it for now. See you after Wrath!

–Lume

About a month ago, someone on my server approached me and asked for my advice on leading a successful raiding guild. This person wasn’t interested in building a guild that could score world firsts or dominate the server competition. Such advice is something I cannot give, as I do not have any experience leading guilds of such caliber. Rather, they simply wanted to know what made Lunacy successful, and how they could go about improving their own guild.

First, however, I must lay out the history of Lunacy and define the style of guild it is. This is, afterall, the context in which I give advice, make decisions, and formulate opinions.

What Lunacy Is, and What It’s Not

Lunacy is a top 100 guild in the U.S. Our kill of M’uru placed 40th in the U.S., while our defeat of Kil’jaeden slipped us down to 64th. With this in mind, we can be considered hardcore. However, we are not a top 20 guild. We are not currently on the same level as any of the guilds on the front page of WoWProgress. Nor did we strive to achieve such a feat during The Burning Crusade.

I’m not about to pretend we’re something we’re not. However, to have killed Entropius (M’uru) well before his first nerf, and to have defeated Kil’jaeden two months before 3.0.2 is no small feat. This puts us in a relatively small class, at the 99.6th percentile of ranked guilds on WoWProgress.

Furthermore, having survived both M’uru and Kil’jaeden as a guild, whom people so fondly refer to as “the guild killers” is also an accomplishment I think is a testament to our guild and our ideals. We value the skill in our members and are constantly evaluating the level at which we play. If we cannot succeed or efficiently progress with the members we have, either we must improve or change our members. In this regard, we can be considered hardcore.

At the same time, however, I am not about to set a raid schedule of five, six or seven days a week. I value the lives of our members, as well as my own. It is simply impossible in this day and age for a person to raid on such a rigorous schedule and still manage to hold some semblance of a normal life. For this reason, we can perhaps be considered casual.

Hence, I always like to refer to Lunacy as a guild with a casual schedule that can accommodate raiders who approach their play in a hardcore manner. We are a “hardcore-casual” guild.

A Brief History of Lunacy

Lunacy did not exist during 1.x. Well, it did, but it was an entirely different guild than it was during The Burning Crusade.

During 1.x, I raided with various guilds. These included Exigence, Black Wolf Mercenaries and Project Mayhem on Proudmoore, as well as Zero Tolerance on Azgalor. My times with Exigence, Project Mayhem and Zero Tolerance were very short. And while my time with Black Wolf was extensive, I could no longer raid with them regularly once they had transitioned to a schedule that was exclusively Australian. After my stint with Project Mayhem, I evaluated my guild options and decided Proudmoore had nothing to offer me. One guild didn’t use voice communication, which I thought was imperative to success during certain encounters. One guild had a prominent officer that ninja’d loot from the raid of a close friend of mine and gloated about it on IRC. Another only raided weekends. And the last option I had was another Australian guild. With all of these guilds ruled out, I decided I would create my own guild at the start of TBC, and spent my time raiding casually with Black Wolf, PUGing BWL, running a PUG MC, and playing the TBC beta.

At first, I was going to transfer servers and start the guild elsewhere. I thought the Australian-American split between Proudmoore’s population was too problematic. However, I realized it would be difficult to establish a guild as a fresh face, and my co-GM convinced me to stay by offering to help lead the guild. This was when the modern version of Lunacy was born. I originally did not want to adopt the same name as my first guild, but Silver was a part of the original incarnation and insisted on the name. So I buckled and agreed, even though they are completely different guilds.

From there, we began recruiting. At the launch of TBC, we had merely five people who intended on raiding with us full-time. After a couple weeks, we had only eight capped members and raided Karazhan with a couple friends filling the last slots. From there, we slowly built our guild from the ground up, running heroics nearly every day to trial potential members and invite those we felt were adequate in meeting the guild’s standards.

Initially, our goal for the guild was set relatively low. The general idea was to create a guild that had the potential to break down raiding walls efficiently and clear all of the bosses in any given content cycle. This is something Proudmoore failed to do in Naxxramas, never defeating Gothik in Naxx-60 before the release of TBC. It was my intention to fill this hole and challenge other guilds by creating a guild that would compete on a level higher than Proudmoore was seeing in the waning days of 1.x.

From Hydross on, Lunacy achieved this goal. The only two bosses we did not achieve sever firsts on in tier five content and above were Lurker and Illidan. Illidan was a major blow to the guild, no doubt. However, it did not dent our morale and instilled in us a desire to rise again to number one in the Sunwell Plateau. Also, it was easy for us to take heart in losing the server first on Illidan, because we only lost by 30 minutes and actually managed to do something no one else in the world had done at the time. We were the first guild in the world to achieve a progression kill (that is, a “guild first”) with a paladin tanking Illidan.

Losing Black Temple to Renaissance did bring us back down to reality, however. Following the loss, we heightened our recruitment standards and vowed to approach Sunwell with an aggression that would elevate us to an entirely different level. If someone’s DPS still needed work, we simply erred on the side of caution and denied them entry into the guild. If they couldn’t deal with various situational abilities, they didn’t make the cut. However, I will admit mistake in being loathe to replace, cut or demote some of the existing members whose performance wasn’t up to our new standard. In this regard, we were slowly evolving, but there were some problems that persisted because we were still a developing guild.

As time passed, we became more concerned with our residual problems. After stalling for some time on Felmyst, Silver and I decided that we would sit anyone we felt wasn’t up to the task at hand for specific encounters. If someone was likely to conflag the raid on the Twins, they would only come in if we absolutely needed them. If someone’s DPS was too poor, we’d put in someone else on M’uru. This new caution and standard led us to place extremely well on M’uru (40th in the U.S.).

However, we weren’t done making refinements and our problems caught up with us. With the midsummer months bringing forth a great amount of attrition, anyone who hadn’t defeated Kil’jaeden faced waning membership and a limited recruitment pool. For this reason, it took us two months to defeat Kil’jaeden. Admittedly, this was perhaps also because we faced some internal problems outside the scope of membership. This experience provided me with perhaps the most perspective on just what I needed to do with the guild to make it successful in the future. For one, recruitment needed to be more aggressive. For another, I needed to act on not only performance problems, but also attitude problems. You can’t build a good raid or succeed if one or two people are souring the mood. And you can’t build a good raid if people don’t adhere to your guild’s philosophies. It is not enough to have people who show up everyday. You need to have people who exemplify what you expect from your raiders. You need to fill holes in your raid. And you need to hammer home your guild’s philosophies.

With that said, we now have a raid that I believe is even stronger than it was during our first kill of Entropius. I have a great amount of confidence in the foundation we’ve built for Wrath, which is something we obviously didn’t have during TBC when we were entirely new. That said, there are challenges ahead in transitioning to a new expansion. But I am not ready to discuss my plans for the future, as they are still being evaluated and decisions are still being made.

Needless to say, the evolution of Lunacy has been astounding and I have a great foundation on which to further build and improve the guild during Wrath.

What to Expect from This Guide

This series of posts is being written for people who hope to create or lead their own hardcore raiding guilds, and for those who find themselves thrust into the leadership ranks of such guilds. This compendium will offer advice and provide contextual examples for the creation, management and improvement of guilds that want to raid on a hardcore level, but maintain an atmosphere that breaks the mold from most other hardcore raiding guilds.

The series will cover the creation, building and refinement of a hardcore raiding guild. It will provide contextual examples from my own experiences, as well as references to the guilds who have ideas I sometimes like to emulate. It will begin by detailing the situations that can lead to the creation of a guild, followed by ideas on how to develop interest in the guild, how to evaluate players interested in joining, how to improve the efficiency and skill of the raid after the foundation has been set, and how to make any renovations necessary to heighten the success of the guild.