Lately I’ve noticed a lot of guilds dying or struggling in terms of recruitment and progress. Everyone from Forte and Juggernaut, formerly two of the best progression guilds in the world, to the two guilds on Proudmoore who are supposed to be hot on the heels of my own guild.

In regards to Forte, they have officially disbanded, citing a lack of motivation and satisfaction from certain members regarding their performance. They aimed for number one, but only achieved the 40th world kill of M’uru. So I can understand the disappointment, especially considering they were the third guild in the world to have killed Illidan. But competition is fierce these days, and I could see it coming from a mile away. Many guilds had lost the drive to continuously recruit and keep their raids in top shape leading up to Sunwell Pleateau (SP). Also, given the increase in difficulty of SP, any amount of struggling was bound to create a sizable amount of frustration. Winning in Hyjal and BT was more about time investment than anything else. Succeeding in SP, on the other hand, is a combination of both time investment and skill, in addition to maintaining a balanced raid with an adequate number of classes needed to defeat each encounter.

Juggernaut, meanwhile, has reasoned their lack of applications is based on the fact that they were situated on a PvE ruleset, rather than PvP. So they have rerolled on a PvP server (Mal’Ganis; the same server Elitist Jerks is on) with the intention of building a top raiding guild there. Personally, however, I can’t help but suspect their lack of applications are partly a result of some of the infamous “Sebudai, Motivational Speaker” images one of their members made in homage to their leader. That’s not to say Sebudai isn’t a great leader, but a lot of people dislike negativity and anger. And the fact that SK Gaming, Nihilum and Elitist Jerks are so positive is, I believe, one of the very reasons they have been able to overcome their problems and survive. Even though Nihilum lost to SK Gaming, you don’t see them folding entirely or packing their bags.

On my own server (Proudmoore), the #2 and #3 guilds have been having problems of their own. One of them recently had to call off a Sunwell raid because they only had two priests log on for Felmyst, and it is extremely difficult to even bother attempting Felmyst with that number of mass dispels. So they ended up raiding BT, instead. However, they did eventually end up killing Felmyst that same week, but that didn’t give them much time to work in an Eredar Twins kill and progression time on M’uru. I suspect they didn’t even manage to kill the Eredar Twins, considering the absence of the encounter last week from their DKP site. In any case, such a situation is going to make it difficult for their guild to live up to the claim one of their leaders made to another member of ours: That they would put in extra time and beat us on Kil’Jaeden, just like they did for Illidan. But then that’s one of the dangers of SP. Putting in extra time is risky, because the place has so much potential to burn people out. SK Gaming and Nihilum can overcome this danger, because they’re sponsored guilds and have the reputation as numbers one and two in the world. Elitist Jerks can overcome this, because pretty much every raider in SP reads their damn forums. So they can find people willing to put in as much time as they require. But any non-sponsored or average guilds might run into some major problems. I personally experienced this during our first week of SP, when my guild added an extra five hours for the week. A few of our core raiders told me they simply couldn’t raid five times a week, as it would strain their marriages or relationships and make it difficult for them to be productive for school or work. And this is the very reason I argue with one of our members that we shouldn’t add extra time to the raid week unless we’re damn close to killing Kil’Jaeden.

The other guild on our server, meanwhile, has simply had some internal drama. I won’t elaborate, but it seems some members are in disagreement with certain leadership philosophies and are expressing their frustrations over poor raid performance of specific members of the guild. I won’t take sides, because it’s not my guild to lead, but I will state that avoiding such issues is the very reason my co-GM and I try to keep our raid finely tuned and ready to defeat the content we’re up against. If there’s a flaw in the engine, we’ll simply break down and become absolutely frustrated.

Now, my co-GM seems to think other guilds’ problems are simply due to a lack of applicants. But I can’t, for the life of me, understand why many of the upstanding guilds out there survive, while others collapse. Personally, I think it’s primarily due to poor leadership. When word gets around that your guild leader is an ass, people decide to first look elsewhere. In fact, maintaining a calm and collected raid atmosphere is one of the primary reasons we’ve picked up a couple of our recent recruits. Simply put, they find it extremely refreshing that we don’t constantly bitch out our players after every wipe. And some of them are trying to entice their friends to apply to us for this very reason. We understand that mistakes happen and we try to rectify them, but we don’t spit into our microphone or mash our keyboards to point out our problems. And, as we work on our progress in this manner, most of our players improve vastly over time. Those who don’t we end up “benching” for fights where their problems would hinder progress, and this keeps our good players content. And I know damn well I wouldn’t be able to tolerate being in a guild where the raid leader is constantly bitching people out. It would grate my nerves very quickly. So we try to keep the raid generally positive.

I do imagine, however, that we might have a few players disappear after Kil’Jaeden goes down. I can’t help but think the sense of accomplishment is what a few people want, so I can see this being a reason why some guilds might have some major problems. But I think if you’re on top of it, and people are willing to take a step backwards to replace members with people who actually want to be there whether content is on farm or not, you can survive. And I don’t think there will be as large of a drought of applicants as my co-GM seems to think there will be. But we’ll see.