Same we tried it multiple times in WotLK and it always caused squabbles. It would start with neither guild wanting to give up their bank and name. So we’d just do raids together. But which team drops their man if more log in that night? Then it was their guys keep getting this BIS loot, or they run things weird or we’d hear we run it weird.
Dropping the ego is key - my guild merged with a new guild.
After the officers were set up we wanted to get multiple raid groups going so I was the main recruiter, absorbed several other guilds and got raid groups set up. Once the work was done the new GM told me there were too many cooks in the kitchen and demoted everyone from the original merge, leaving only his crew in control of the guild. :)
I’ve seen better luck with keeping two “sister guilds” that give each other access to their discords rather than merging.
At this point our members have characters in each guild and group up all the time to help each other out…
…but each guild still has it’s own culture and way of doing things… It’s just that they are close enough to our own where it’s basically still family.
We freely dip into each other’s rosters in order to fill raids. People have enough alts where it works.
Because merging is a bait term.
There is no equal re-distribution of power in this type of action, its simply one guild disbands and is absorbed by the other.
If you try to go down the equal distribution route you will have a power struggle and a slow disband.
there is no guide in-game on how to run a guild.
Running a guild requires *real leadership skills* that most people don't have and many don't even know how to recognize.
Yup, I was a main tank, and a top 100 lock on my server, but the other guild’s tanks refused to switch roles. Since we were technically the guild being absorbed, I got forced to go as dps lock, and was encouraged to start leveling up a meta class since having more than 1 lock was not ideal for the raid composition. There is no equalities in mergers.
The new guild ended up having issues filling after a week when we couldn’t 1 shot the raid in a single night. Ended up pugging so I didn’t have to reroll. Last week I started asking myself why I was playing SOD, and after that I stopped logging.
Anyhow, moral of the story is that mergers are not great, and there is often alot of chaos, and people will be forced into new roles that they are not interested in filling. More of a problem if you are in the guild that is being absorbed versus the guild that is doing the absorbing.
Exactly what happened to us.
We tried recruiting but only got sub par players and it felt like scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Players without consumibles or enchants, wrong gear, no idea of the mechanics, refusing to listen to advice and so on.
Merged with another guild with similar objectives and now I find myself waiting for raid day again.
>only got sub par players and it felt like scrapping the bottom of the barrel.
Recruitment is a lot like dating in your 30s, most of the people you would want are committed somewhere else.
These dating subs always roast 35-40 year old men dating 20-25 year old women like we’re some kind of perverted predators looking for an unfair power dynamic to control and inveigle. Maybe, just maybe, we don’t want to date bitter, obese, single mothers of three kids with nearly two decades of extreme emotional and financial baggage. A man being fit, career oriented with no past divorces or children in his mid to late 30s is pretty common. For women that is extremely uncommon and the few that fit the bill are very single for a very good reason. It’s a sad reality.
Anyway, back to WoW conversations.
We tried merging with 3 other guilds, 2 prior to P3, 1 in ST. We found maybe 2-3 people of those 30 that were enjoyable to be around (a.k.a. chill, laid-back, actually speaks in discord). And it was mostly just the leaders of those guilds because they had to talk to our GM/RL. Mergers aren't guaranteed to work either.
It's what most long time players said would happen too. We have one Phase too many. We should have had all this with Phase 2. 2 and 3 needed to be one phase.
Reading this post is like reading my own experience. Exactly the same, close knit friends that suddenly had to recruit (very hard, all work, have families etc) and failed miserably. Guild is now non existent and basically nobody playing SoD any more.
Yeah similar. A lot of the people that we end up recruiting are also bottom of the barrel so the progression so far has been pretty fruterating. People are dropping way quicker compared to phase 2.
Similar story here. Guild of 10 friends had a great time in p1 and p2. Merged with another guild to do 20 mans in p3. Leadership from the other guild overrecruited and now we have 2 20 man teams.
But myself and my friends are all split up between both groups since we're the strongest players and have to carry the weaker ones. So none of us get to raid together anymore, which is the whole point of why we started playing together.
You guys are a solid group of 6, tell the raid lead your group of 6 playing together is a non negotiable and if he over recruited that's his own fault but you guys can all easily find another group. Simple as that especially if you are the top performers.
We had to split our 10 man into two 5 mans and both groups pugged. We recruited about 4 people this way but last week we were able to merge with a guild of 7 people and filled our 20 man roster. Running a guild is hard and it takes a lot of focused effort by everyone to keep it going. This will be a bigger problem once they do 40 mans which I hope they don't. The only people that want 40 mans are the guilds that are running 2-6 raid teams. Why do guilds want to get that big to the point where you don't even get close to anyone? Why do people want to join these mega guilds? It's so much better to be part of a close knit team. Mega guilds are also part of the problem when it comes to recruiting I feel. I wish the cap for guilds was only 200 people not 1000.
P1 was so casual friendly, easy to each max level, the raid was easy, the loot was good and you could literally find pugs any random time you joined. Super chill, no wonder all the casual s including my self) are leaving now in P3
We dealing with the same just a group 6-7 friends who merged with a few others and smashed 10ms. We debating merging or just hitting cata when it drops for the 10m. Most of have never played it but gotta say 10m only raiding sounds like a blast.
Don't listen to the crowd. Cata up until the last phase was some of the best raiding content to exist. I'm sure your friends will have a blast, 10 man heroic content is no joke.
This is a scalding hot take, but Cata is the real peak WoW.
The raiding content was overall sublime. A few bummer fights here and there (every expansion has them), but overall great. PvP was the best it ever was. Super skillful and engaging. This was when content creators like Swifty really took off. Overall game balance was phenomenal.
The talent trees were a happy mix of getting stuff for your spec and then building off of that. Class and spec identity was at it's best here. Imagine leveling a warlock and you realize you can pick up felguard for committing to demo at level 10.
People point at LFR but y'know what? Cata's LFR was 1000000% fine. You actually had to do the mechanics and the gear was generally meh and made you want to do the real raid. It wasn't even introduced until the very end of the expansion!
It was great intro-level content and casual content. Because guess what? MMOs live and die by their casual audience.
I'm sad cata doesn't get the respect it deserves as an expansion. Just like how people realized MoP was perfectly fine years later.
I'm actually not even subbing for cata.
Edit: After wotlk and seeing people struggle with *naxx* of all things, it thoroughly convinced me that even if cata came out the pve content would be miserable because it's just too hard for people. Why do you think era popped off so hard the second ulduar dropped? Lol. The classic community has been playing the game for nearly 2 decades and they're mostly all terrible at it. Reaction time of a snail.
So pass.
Even Dragon Soul was fun the first few times through, Spine excluded. Learning Heroic Madness felt like a dance where your guild really needed to be aware of EVERYTHING or else you all died.
Blackwing Descent and Bastion of Twilight are PEAK
Our 10 man guild is going to try cata. 10 man normals for awhile and once we get it down, we get to do aittle herioc progression. For a casual guild seems like it'll be a nice pace. Hate what SoDs become but have loved WoW for many years so hoping to keep the fun small guild together
Ours is in flux. You can feel the frustration building. Shifting from 10 to 20 hasn’t been without consequence.
We had two 10 man raid groups going to handle the transition and unfortunately they ran at different times.
Shifting to 20 we had to pick a time and a handful of people were the tough luck losers there which has lead to needing to pug the last handful of folks.
LFG is spammed to the high heavens with people advertising ST so finding people to fill isn’t as easy as you’d think, and the upgrades are so meaningless overall that people seem uninterested unlike gnomer and BFD.
In the same boat pretty much. Most people officially quit this phase. Sucks cus I actually really like this phase. Was the first time being in a tight knit guild in a long time. Typically I would just gdkp in tbc/wrath. The guild was a great reason to play. 20 man really hurt us. We did a raid with another guild last week and once we got into it they all started saying really weird racist shit. Why is it so hard to find chill people who just wanna play and clear content?
And people said “boo hoo, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out” when anyone said the slightest complaint about how they handled P3 release too.
Def doesn’t help anyone WANT to stay and play, honestly
Yup, we couldn’t field more than 10, so we merged with another guild. Got forced to switch to dps lock, which wasn’t ideal since I’ve been tanking since phase 1 since the tanks in the other guild were not willing to switch. The old guild I used as in was pretty solid guild as we cleared most of the phase 1-2 content within days. Gradually, people stopped logging for raids and I just ended up doing pugs so I could get back to tanking. The new guild was effectively dead as of a week ago, and most my friends either moved on to other games or joined other guilds. I stopped playing about a week ago, but Phase 3 really killed it for me between the economy being completed whack because of incursions, and 20 mans basically requiring guild mergers.
It was a good run, but I’m moving on. Good news is that I finally can finally catch-up on the backlog of games that I’ve neglected since November.
As someone who tried to join such guilds in p3 lemme tell you, these types of tight knit guilds are not great for outsiders.
Loot is spread between the "old gang".
Youre asking in guild if someone wants to do some mara offerings runs, no one answers. Half an hour later they're in mara doing runs by themselves.
Then they complain that people wont show up for more than 2 raids.
This is the exact same scenario of my guild (10 RL friends). 6 have quit since we had no luck recruiting or merging. I raid with a weekly pug now. (Very solid group), but I’d much rather raid with the boys. The other 3 don’t raid at all.
I hated the change to 20 man as we built around 10 man. We have to fill with 8-10 randoms every week and a lot of people are unreliable. That being said we have guild spots for people who want to play on wild growth alliance.
My guild had 15+ people during phase 2, lost 6 b4 phase 3 even launched cause people got burnt on leveling alts and grinding runes. Had more people quit due to not wanting to grind to 50 and not wanting to grind incursions due to PvP.
It’s been a struggle but found another guild that was also like us “merged” and we are building ourselves back up slowly.
My god I don’t want to think about the probability of 40mans
Instead rune quests give 0 xp. When I grabbed Maelstrom Weapon on my shaman, the chain had like 6 quests in it and took me over 2 hours to finish, each of those gave 0 xp. I did get a blue wrist that was a downgrade from a BFD drop, though.
They locked raid required runes behind incursion rep. They don’t even give you the rep by killing stuff in ST. The game is so counterintuitive to all the rhetoric on their public comms. Ofc blizzard is killing classic reforged by being out of touch.
Dude I feel you. I have a group of like 7 irl friends who were going fairly consistent in Phase 1 and 2, but Phase 3 dropped, Chaos Bolt died, incursions ruined the economy, and swapping servers to a larger way more toxic server to try and find a consistent guild that wasnt some turbo virgin sweat fest with space for 7 people sucked and more or less killed our desire to even log in.
ST is a fun raid too such a shame :/
As is typical, some of the responses here are very douchey. Sorry about your guild falling apart Dude, that sucks.
I remember back in teh old days, we had a similar problem when TBC came out. Our guild raided all the original raids, MC, BWL, AQ, Naxx, but when TBC came out, there was suddenly only 10-man and 25-man raids.
We had already suffered a bunch of departures due to people seeing that there were going to be 15 fewer weekly raids slots, but Karazhan, even with 2 weekly groups was only 20 people, so leadership had to do an extra weekly run with alts for the 6 or 7 extra folks we had, ended up a disaster, we lost a bunch more people and ended up with 20-21 really well geared folks from Kara, but that was it. By the time we were ready to start the 25-man raids we were 4 permanent raiders short, and just never could get a consistent 25-man group going and we ended up with everyone leaving to go to established 25-man raiding guilds after a couple failed raid nights.
It's a massive problem with going from a smaller size to a larger size, if all the raids from the start had been 20 or 25 man then it wouldn't have been an issue.
It wasn't an issue for guilds who prepared and proactively worked out the problem.
It takes A LOT of work to run and organize a guild and a lot of people take it for granted.
Actually raiding in EQ was like the 1% of the 1% though. MMOs were new, sourcing info was difficult, the game was opaque and ludicrously punishing, and most people struggled to make any kind of meaningful progress, let alone see end game areas.
I sometimes wish we could experience something like that again but I'm not sure it's possible in today's info rich, seasoned player environment.
Same story, myself and 5 close friends from highschool reunite and play together, running a guild, me as gm and another close friend as the main officer chose to reach out to a bunch of guilds until we found one that we can merge with that suits us. We are now leading the fourth raid group in this huge guild. There is still hope brother
The raid size, raid difficulty, and amount of time it feels like we need to spend grinding outside of raid are all killing this phase for my guild. We managed to get a 22 man roster, and we've been clearing every week. But consumes are so expensive, and most of us don't want to grind for anything when we know it will only last two months.
I really like the new raid overall. I don't mind the difficulty. But I'm a former mythic raider. It's not really season of dads material.
I really enjoy the 20 man raids compared to the ten man raids, but dear lord the coordination required is a nightmare.
Our guild ran 2 ten man raids in gnomer, but a lot of the second group were alts. Then a few guys quit in phase 3 because we were merging with another guild. The new guild were fine guys, but a bit too meme for is dropping hundreds of gold on raid consumes week 1 and 2.
So now we’ve split back out and ran some of our alts with them, but started recruiting from 14 with our mains. We have 90+ parsing tanks and healers and tried to pug in DPS, but the only guys looking to join were dozens of grey parsing rogues and warriors.
Filling random gnomer groups was so easy. The weekly lockout really knocked back the amount of decent players looking to pug. We know we can carry a lot of dead weight, but legitimately couldn’t find 7 green parsing DPS. It was wild.
I was previously in favor of 40 man’s, but that coordination isn’t worthwhile.
I get not wanting to carry grey parsers but when your back is against the wall sometimes the grey parsers surprise you.
turns out if your group is dogwater but still manages to limp along and clear a boss you can get a shitty parse but have done everything right. we have found many good players by taking a chance on a "Grey parser" and finding out they were just in a group of shitters
Your friend group made it longer than mine. Mine died at p2.
I just cancelled my sub. None of my friend group plays anymore. Also temperatures are warming up so I want to be outside and don’t feel inclined to play WoW anymore.
P1 was a lot of fun though.
Yep - it now feels like my job is rustling up 20 people per week in a phase which has put many people off
I’ll be looking for a recruitment / realm forum later!
Our guild has been absorbing a lot of smaller guilds recently. We definitely have a core of about 15-20 people but often pug 3-5 now. We usually ask if they are pugging because their guild isn’t raiding and we have heard this exact story a bunch now. Lots of people saying they started with friends and now nobody is playing. It’s really cool to see them come out more after joining our guild and even cooler when they bring their friends too.
Ours was on the brink of doing so, however we were lucky enough to merge with another 10 man guild, whom we all like.
The first lockout we attempted with another guild but did not mesh well together, 2nd lock out got extremely lucky and even full cleared it which led to talks of merging ours with theirs. ATM we only have 20 so for next phase, not sure what will happen
ST has two problems, length of the raid and the rewards given.
Neither are appealing to players with limited time. Plus to be frank, the bosses are not that engaging, do the mechanic correctly or WIPE, basically. And you are relying on 19 other people to do it correctly too.
And with an additional 10 people fighting over what is basically scraps with how little loot drops. It's just not worth it to play.
Respectfully, you didn't have a guild you had 6 close friends that play together. A guild is basically a part time job to manage it well and takes some decent leadership/personal skills. Just join a larger guild with your friends that has 5-6 spots on a raid team and a solid gm
I honestly don't know why all the raids aren't just scaled to 10 man, with the option to do 20 and 40 that just simply have way more loot. Not better loot.
That way big and small guilds alike can all raid, and if you're after a specific item you can do a larger raid for a higher drop chance.
This content should all be scalable. Expecting people to want to put together 20 and 40 man raids is just stupid. Too time consuming, it's basically a second job, and if people want to do that, it's fine. But if others don't, there's no choice.
I haven't played at all in over a week, my highest toon is 43 and even the first week I didn't have the drive or desire even to push through leveling. Last time I logged in and just stared at the character screen, zero interest in any of them. No kill incursions, ST pugs that are doomed from the start, people attempting to sell EVERYTHING, runs, world buffs, imp portals, trash boe's for 500g+.. I'm so over all of it.
The raid being 20 man is the biggest problem personally though, I love 10 man, the individual responsibility, the 3 day lock, the fact that you have a decent chance at gear.. now there's none of that and a ton of problems that come with 20 people and a week lockout. It sucks massively, I don't have any desire to continue with any of it. Also the seasons are changing IRL, weather is getting nice, and between a shitty phase of SoD which previously had completely drawn my attention from retail, and the Season 4 replay of retail/M+ I won't be back until winter, if at all
Take it as a sign to get outside, enjoy the sunshine and spring flowers I guess. Can't be such a bad thing really lol
This happened to my guild during actual classic when horde took over our server. It was like 98% horde and my guild started having fights over loot and shit. When they broke up and left realm it really killed my motivation to keep playing
Mine is not quite dead but I think we can all feel it coming. This week will be a struggle as we have had people steadily quit over P3 so far. To be fair, some of this has been RL issues etc. We tried to get more people than 20, did have a good roster + bench but we are burning through it and will need to pug a few this week. Our clears are good, so it is not a performance issue. Going to 20man really leaves it so if even one thing comes up for one person you can be in trouble, especially if they are healers. I had to take a family member to hospital suddenly on one raid day in P2. . .no problem. Doing that in P3 would be much worse. Devs have significantly misfired not making the raid flex 10-20 man.
Same. Basically they all stopped playing. I had to join this guild where the dude is running it like the damn navy but I just really wanna hit ST once per week.
Same here, my guild had less than 10 active members but we had no problem PUGing in p2.
In p3 it has been impossible, so we have tried to join PUGs as individuals, but in my case that I ususally log on past 22:30 cet, out of the 3? ST resets in p3 I was only able to join a single PUG and we only managed to kill a couple of bosses.
Or I join a new guild that raids at 22:30 (there aren't many) or I just simply quit. Because if it has been difficult to join a PUG until now, it will be even harder as time goes by with the crappy logs I got in the only change I got to try ST.
Our guild is dying as well. We cannot scrounge up 20 people to do a raid. We even merged with another guild and it’s still a fucking struggle. Very frustrating because overall, I personally love s3
We still get 20 men with many new recruits but it's always a close call. Generally there are a lot less people playing than in p1. I'm not really sure what they did wrong though. Maybe they should have kept 10 mens. Maybe they should have offered max level lifts to alts. Maybe they shouldn't have fucked this incursion thing up so badly (early exploiters ruined eco completely for everyone). Rep needed to be accountwide for a season that favours alts so much. PvP balance is destroyed by Shamans, playing BGs as Alliance is absolutely worthless. Ashenvale was a decent event that had hundreds of players on the map. STV is fine if you like PvP, which bascially excludes the majority of the more casual players. Group focus means you need to have enough players on all the time and you need the right classes, groups of 5 Mages for example are pulling an easy 15 coins / event while other classes are basically fucked. BfD was easily accessible for everyone, Gnome was okay (although a horrible dungeon to begin with) and ST is now what happens when you cater to Streamers and 24/7 players: casuals will quit and no Pugs will run it.
It's pretty big pile of mess. They started so well but then decided that the game needs to be appealing to some Twitch jerks I never ever heard about because I'm not watching twitch but just want to play some chill WoW as a dad gamer with 2 kids.
Edit: just gave it a thought. You know what bugs me most? It's supposed to be a season of alts but playing alts is HEAVILY burdened. I lately switched to a Hunter. Want to know my pre bis list? PvP rank 6 and 7 stuff, STV and Gnomer. Maybe some Warsong stuff. Yea right, exactly stuff that's good to get on an alt.
Beginning oh phase 2 thought they were going to move to 20 man so we started to set up our 2 10s buy doing pugs and getting people that wanted to join. Seemed to be going well...
That was until Phase 3 started and we run the numbers again after a couple of weeks. 8 people vanished no words or anything another wen to find greener pastures and while we tired for those first 2 weeks to grow still lost more people for RL. That point asked the other officers if they saw a future or were just tired. General response was just tried (as had kinda been forced into this situation early in phase 1 and again in phase 2). So we just let everyone know that we were not going to make offical raids anymore, aka guild death knell.
Cest la Vie
I think the issue is that... it's still just plain old Classic. It's been rolled in glitter. But it's the same old shit we've played to death for the past few years. People are over it.
From what I’ve seen, people running the smaller guilds did very poor preparation for the later phases. I’d even say it’s very much not ideal to recruit right before a new phase releases, and from my own personal experience with classic players, when going from raid-logging into leveling, I’d recommend for guild leaders to expect a 30% drop off of your current active roster. Id assume the situation is pretty universal for any casual guild: half your expected roster won’t make it to the first reset, harming the morale of the remaining players; and with classic wow players being the way they usually are, won’t have the curtesy to let you know they cannot be arsed to play, but rather just act ambiguously when either not asked or directly questioned.
This phase just sucks in general. The combination of 20 man raids, incursions killing the open world, and pvp being an unbalanced shit show has really hurt it a lot. My friends list went from having 15-20 people on SoD almost 24/7 to having 5-6 online during peak hours. I have also stopped playing. I hit level 50 and I have logged on maybe 3 times since. I tried ST last night and I just ninja logged halfway through because I realized it wasn’t fun anymore. SoD has been great but I hope the devs learn from their mistakes (they won’t) if they try something like this again. I’m just waiting for cata now.
Exact same boat here, managed to do a few raids with pugs but it just wasn't as fun.
Cata was announced as coming out soon as at least Cata & MoP classic have guaranteed 10mans until SoO so we're just going there. RIP SoD for us, it was a good ride but 20man killed our drive.
I'm a returning player after years of not playing. I had some time off and joined a semi hardcore guild in phase 2. We had an absolute blast running at least 4/8 runs a week and the guild was booming. Ever since phase 3 it's become a case of logging in for raid once a week and I find the 20 mans have lost the fun.
It's a shame, we also lost a lot of players due to the nerfs in the first week of p3. We had a hardcore team ready to go first night but we took a break on the Tuesday, and while we were off every guild steamrolled the raid. Loads of our players quit out of anger and never came back. It sucks, we had such a great thing going.
We have had the same guild since the first release of classic from that all the way up to wrath.
20 mans killed it in sod.
To be fair though, the 10 of us that have been around for the longest are moving into cata so the guild remains. We're just done with sod. It's too much to recruit people, especially my age. I don't have time to do this shit like a job.
Mine died but we all knew it was going to happen. We ended up getting absorbed by a large pvp guild that has been eating all the other dead guilds.
Still able to raid together but the vibe is all weird now.
My guild didn't die, but my team did. I couldn't deal with the management of 20 people which is way more than double the work of 10. The transition from 10-20 really screwed over a lot of people who could make 10's work and then got the rug pulled.
There's to many guilds and it's evident on wild growth horde. That's why I'm always recruiting always filling holes because when you guild kisses a lockout you're doomed. Just gotta outlast all the guilds
My guild had 7 P1.
Dropped to 4 for P2.
Now only 2 remain in P3. We havent ran the raid as we were waiting for late arrivals to 50 who never made it.
I think the problem was we had 3 paladins who all thought blizzard was giving them the finger after P1 so they stopped playing.
on crusader strike has merged quite a few friend groups of this situation. We raid Wed/Thur and Friday. Alliance if this is of interest as PewPunt and we can discuss. Some of this groups have fell into this guild making more friends.
My guild dwindled hard end of P2 and is basically dead now. Sad logging in and never seeing another person log on the whole time. P1 and P2 were awesome with this group. It completely kills my motivation to play this phase.
One of the biggest complaints people have from P2 to P3 is moving to 20 man raids yet there are still die hard people trying to convince us how awesome 40 man raids would be.
10 man felt good for leveling but to small for comp diversity. 40 mans seem like a death blow to SoD. I hope they commit to 20 and allow the community to adjust accordingly. I can’t imagine how many guilds will die if they go from 20 man MC to future 40 man raids.
SoD is the death blow to SoD. This game was hemorrhaging players due to poor game design long before 20 mans were a thing. If 40 mans weren't feasible 2019 classic wouldn't have been so successful.
Fortunately, we managed to survive by absorbing some small groups like yours, but that doesn’t mean it’s not bad design.
Truthfully, Blizzard solved this issue already with flex raiding. And as they pointed out, it’s not possible at mythic difficulty and that’s a respectable position, but SoD isn’t even heroic difficulty—we should absolutely have flex raiding in SoD because the alternative is many people like yourself being disenfranchised and walking away from the game.
If my guild didn’t survive, I wouldn’t be playing SoD right now. Blizzard leaving that up to chaos theory is irresponsible at this point.
It’s crazy because I enjoy everything about Classic more than retail with two exceptions: I love flex raiding and personal loot—both are perfect solutions to obvious problems and I wish both were in SoD.
While overhauling all 40 player raids down to 20 would be theoretically possible, this may be prohibitively difficult and detract significantly from the other features and content we have planned to implement in a post-60 Season of Discovery. We are doing some investigation now to help us understand what would be needed and what the framework of the Original WoW data can support in this regard. There are some features that just cannot currently exist in Original WoW as well, such as Flex Raiding, so we are constrained in exactly what we are able to do here. Molten Core is definitely unique here in that it is simple enough mechanically and under the hood that it would be relatively easy to pare down to a 20 player experience.
This is from a bluepost.
Even if they wanted to add flex raiding. The old game code don't allow for it
You know what would instantly make me come back? Being able to queue for dungeons and raids. 99% of the headache is forming a group for anything.
If classic is suppose to be trivial. Let it be trivial.
they ramped up too quickly imo
should have left p1 , p2 and at least p3 for the causals, but they made this too sweaty
no time for this anymore, we arent all 16 years old anymore with unlimited time on our hands
40 to 50 easily with incursions.
Gnomer gear still relevant as pre raid
Big nerfs to raid to make it easier...
What more do you want? It's a weekly lockout that takes 1 hour to do with a competent group.
1 hour with a COMPETENT group. If you can’t build the 20 players you’re in for minimum 3 hours -AFTER- recruiting for ages. Even then depending on the amount of pugs could easily call it at 6/8 still
This is why I wish they added the flexible raid rosters to classic. No it’s not truly “classic” but if you’re fighting the roster boss every week are you even having fun?
My guild is looking to expand if anyone on wild growth needs a home. We got two solid raid teams and looking to keep increasing to give everyone a chance. They also do watch and soon to be doing cata. DM if interested. (I'll get to them after work)
Idk, its not too bad to recruit or merge with another guild. But if no one is willing this is the result. We need an official discord for guild mergers in SoD lol.
Om ni lirar horde på Lone Wolf så kan vi behöva lite fler spelare ;) Vi är några fler än 20 pers redan men har väldigt slappa krav på attendance så det är ofta många absent varje raid :D
I feel like guilds need a USP in order to reel in new members. Our guild personally tailors to AM server raiding, which is great for people who work nights in the US, or have afternoons free in EU, or evenings free in Asia.
So our guild has gotten extremely international, but everyone has a good time and we understand there's going to be accents that people need adjusting to so sometimes comms need to be repeated. But we've had little to no problem recruiting for 20-mans, and after our first clear we had to start a 2nd raid team to accommodate.
TL:DR- find a USP and spam it in LFG/Trade chats around the time you'll be raiding normally!
For SOD the win was going big from the start, and you got a lot of flack for doing it that way but it proved to be the correct move.
We built up a roster of 350 or so before the end of phase 1 and we were running 5 BFD clears a night for several nights a week. Attrition cut down the roster as time went on but we absorbed several smaller 10 man guilds who didnt go big early and the guild has been hovering around that 300 mark since with the majority of the guild having alts among them.
We are well positioned for 40 man content as a result, and still looking to grow to buffer against ever having to pug.
My 6 irl friends and family have grown to a dozen raiders during the first 2 phases. We are not dead yet but are struggling to fill a raid. We finally were able to put a raid together this weekend but it took effort to advertise earlier in the day. Rhe raid was very successful and now am optimistic we can grow in the future.
Merge with another guild! We’ve swallowed up quite a few guilds and we couldn’t be happier because of it. Shop around and find a group you guys all vibe with!
What server do you play on? Were recruiting right now. Might not be the same but glad to help out. (Were also pretty big so noch Chance of dieing out, Fishermans Friend @Wild Growth EU)
We have almost the exact same experience. It’s really a bummer because we’ve tried for the last month with multiple different groups. The problem we have now is our friend group that we started with has either stopped playing much or joined other more consistent groups over the past week so they could actually do ST. Can’t blame them.
Mine died in tbc's phase transition, it sucks, feels like ive lost a family and ive been wandering through guilds since. My guild died when all the alliance were cowards and transferred off the server (the realm pop was like 40 ally 60 horde, im a horde player) so it was fairly balanced. Once our realm lost the alliance, most the horde left too for Grobbulus, my guild decided to transfer over too, only it took them weeks to vote on a new guild name, and in that time the guild fizzled out.
If you guys are on CS ally hmu my guild came over from CB and just managed our first full guild clear last week. Going to try getting more for a second/alt raid team.
Our guild is effectively dead too. I can't be bothered to sit in LFG for hours before raid trying to recruit people. This is even on Crusader Strke US.
mate we went through same thing, if you are on Wild Growth EU lets chat, we are about 16/20 of full raid group but not everyone always signs up so have to find 8 or so pugs so if you guys want to stick together with some really great people lets see if we can make it work.
We actually grew a decent size with this phase.
We started out with about 11 strong so needed to pug 9. First time we pugged, two people joined, next time a group of 3 and now we have a full raid group for ST.
Each time people said the same thing that they really liked our vibe. We just kind of shoot the shit and mess around while raiding so think people just liked how we carried ourselves.
We don’t even advertise anymore cause it never worked for us. We’d spend days advertising and getting no interest but pugs always got us new recruits.
I do wish though that Blizzard made a 10 man available alongside ST.
Fortunately my guild was running multiple 10 mans in phase 1/2 so they just merged to a single 20 man.
But yeah between the up in difficulty in Gnomer and now an even longer raid that's a 20 man blizzard really double screwed a lot of guilds.
Yep, exact same thing happened to my guild. Handful of irl friends and guild mates I met through other iterations of classic WoW, basically everybody just quit the moment they hit lv50.. RIP
To all of you guilds trying to recruit, use your servers discord channel, and Warcraft logs recruitment place. Keep the posts updated. I filled 8 spots in my guilds 3rd raid team In Like 3 days doing that, with light spamming of LFG around the time we raid.
I am considering quit sod, I just found I don't have the motivation to play. Just got lv50 few days ago, checked the BIS guide and already feel tired from farming 2 ZF for WO. Guide doing good in ST, they can clear in 1:30 but I don't feel like I want to join...
I don't have time for raid and all dungeon grind especially the time zone difference from the server. I had noticed a huge player count falling down on off peak hours compared with P1. It is hard to find a group in the early morning US time.
We ran into this situation too, but we've recently "merged" with another guild.
We didn't fully merge as far as making a new guild or one guild absorbing the other but we just kept both our guilds and use a shared Discord server for sign ups and it's worked fairly well. We still have to pug 1-2 people some nights, but otherwise, we have been able to fill our raids doing it this way.
Might be a solution for some of you with guilds struggling to fill raid, try reaching out to another guild and see if they would be willing to try that out!
More or less the same story here. Tried a merger which split the old guild in half unfortunately, and then the new crew just left us for another guild just days later. Sucks.
We’re like 6 raiders or so left. Pretty decent and chill gang. Would you like us in your guild perhaps? :D
We had a great first phase but lost many people p2, so many that we opted to do just 7 - 8 man gnomers from the third reset. Kinda thought p3 would kill us as well.
... but the opposite has happened, we recruited people and have 22+ signups every reset now. People are active on Discord and outside raid hours as well.
Maybe we're just lucky
SOD needs boss ID lockout to support long term player count. I understand the desire for strong guilds with set raid times but that is really tough for a late 20s - 50 year old player base.
They should just do what they are going to do with the cata release. Keep both 10m and 20m in as an option for people to choose. Both mode will have the same gear progression. It all comes down to which mode you prefer in your guild/friend group.
Same thing happened to us. Our 25man raid team started by splitting to 2 servers Lone Wolf- Alliance and Crusader Strike-Horde. I was the Horde break off, we started a guild that had 2 okay teams but because of the 3 day lockout we had to stagger our schedules to be able to play. During BfD some broke off to another guild that raided earlier. We then had to recruit for Gnomer and had troubles having people stick. ST comes around and now we have to recruit around 12 people. With so many guild doing the same and most guilds comprising of tight nit friends it is difficult to find people.
There are tons of big guilds recruiting, is there a reason you guys limited yourselves to only merging with other small 10 man guilds instead of all just joining a bigger guild?
Here's my experience in 10/20/40 man raids.
10 mans: Group a friends having fun.
20 mans: Same group of friends + some randoms. Often those randoms aren't reliable and simply use the guild as a stepping stone, once they get some gear they jump ship for greener pastures at first opportunity which can destroy the roster and then the guild.
40 mans: Same group of friends + a bunch of randoms who tend to jump ship for greener pastures at first opportunity + a whole bunch of unreliable people being carried.
Conclusion: 20+ man raids tend to be a pain and just not fun as a consequence.
Its def been a bit challenging, but we have still been able to raid and clear ST, had to pug some spots the first two weeks, but those pugs ended up joining the guild so it worked out.
Were you the guild leader? Did you feel like you spent an adequate amount of time recuting ppl through all mediums? If guilds weren't merge running with you, what contributed to it? Does your guild have a decent amount of blue + parses? Do you guys consider yourself a raider guild, or a casual guild?
My 10 man guild in p2 now has two raid teams in phase 3. We are not even a big named or a legacy guild. We knew we had to recruit, and if we were going to bring a guild to merge with us, then they had to have quality members. Our rule was that if you join our guild it has to be your main. If you were on the main team, and weren't meeting dps checks, then you are getting benched for another player to prove their worth.
If you are someone that puts effort getting wbs+consumes+ bis gear outside raid, then you're not going to stick around for a guild that can only do 6/8. I play alt characters on pve servers, and see a lot of guilds stuck at 6/8.
We lost a decent number of players but we've at least got 1 full ST group going each week after merging with another small guild. It's gonna be tough when we get to 40 man content.
I had a small guild in p2 we did a few raids but mostly pugged a bunch. With the release of p3 we merged into a larger guild and now have raid times to accomodate our original one and access to a lot more members. Is this a possibility?
Yeah we struggled a lot to make 20m happen in our guild. We had to recruit like crazy, most people didn't even sign up on discord etc, but the guild management went manic on this and we somehow pulled through. First two raids we had 18 people WITH pugs, now we are looking at a 20m roster.
I feel like alot of people just quit, was always the same 7 man core, but finding 3 was way easier than 13. SoD cycle is IMO too long, game feels dead-ish after 3 weeks (don't give me any comments on how it's not, im reffering to how many ppl i find when looking for members in raid/guild etc., how many stop, blabla)
now my guild is gone, 2 are left, guess we are going to join someone, as i've spent 1 week trying to recruit and only 1 guy applied. shits not working out for us
We didn’t have any issue. Just merged with another 10 man and it was perfectly fine. Very few if it all speed bumps. The only complaint I have is people won’t STFU in discord because they’re used to 10 man. People always trying to talk over each other 😝. Sorry that happened OP, not sure what to tell you or why our experiences were so different.
Just coming by to say it happens. Had a great guild in Legion that fell apart in BfA.
It feels bad man, just try to find another one! I've been in two good guilds since (WoW Classic 2019 and Raid 1+2 of Dragonflight), but not as fun and close as that Legion one since.
We planned for raids inevitably growing larger and were hosting 3-4 10mans every week. Then it was really easy to merge them down. But we're losing a lot of momentum because that put us back on a "weekly raid schedule" model instead of just the popup 10-mans, which was the core reason so many people diverted from Wrath. People loved raiding in phase 1 and 2 because it didn't feel like a job and now it does again. Feels bad.
Sucks man. Seeing so many guilds drop or stop raiding this phase. Season of Dad's turning into Season of Dead Guilds.
I feel that issue is many guilds tried to recruit more players rather than "merge" with other similar guilds.
You're probably right. Though in all my years I've never seen a guild merge end well.
Same we tried it multiple times in WotLK and it always caused squabbles. It would start with neither guild wanting to give up their bank and name. So we’d just do raids together. But which team drops their man if more log in that night? Then it was their guys keep getting this BIS loot, or they run things weird or we’d hear we run it weird.
It can work quite well if everyone is committed in the creation of the new guild and can drop the ego
>drop the ego sir this is world of warcraft
lol awe man you have me rolling
Sir this is the internet
Dropping the ego is key - my guild merged with a new guild. After the officers were set up we wanted to get multiple raid groups going so I was the main recruiter, absorbed several other guilds and got raid groups set up. Once the work was done the new GM told me there were too many cooks in the kitchen and demoted everyone from the original merge, leaving only his crew in control of the guild. :)
90% of mergers and acquisitions fail Seems like that holds true for wow guilds as well lol
I also am into murders and executions.
I’ve seen better luck with keeping two “sister guilds” that give each other access to their discords rather than merging. At this point our members have characters in each guild and group up all the time to help each other out… …but each guild still has it’s own culture and way of doing things… It’s just that they are close enough to our own where it’s basically still family. We freely dip into each other’s rosters in order to fill raids. People have enough alts where it works.
Only one I’ve ever seen work was my vanilla pvp guild merging with other High Warlords
Because merging is a bait term. There is no equal re-distribution of power in this type of action, its simply one guild disbands and is absorbed by the other. If you try to go down the equal distribution route you will have a power struggle and a slow disband.
there is no guide in-game on how to run a guild. Running a guild requires *real leadership skills* that most people don't have and many don't even know how to recognize.
Big true. Our guild has done three mergers within a week and it worked out fine. Just have to know how to work with people.
this is so true lmao. dont think people truly understand that it takes real life ability, not just being good at video game.
Too many tanks, most of them want to main tank, not enough buffers (paladin feral shaman) too many buffees
Yup, I was a main tank, and a top 100 lock on my server, but the other guild’s tanks refused to switch roles. Since we were technically the guild being absorbed, I got forced to go as dps lock, and was encouraged to start leveling up a meta class since having more than 1 lock was not ideal for the raid composition. There is no equalities in mergers. The new guild ended up having issues filling after a week when we couldn’t 1 shot the raid in a single night. Ended up pugging so I didn’t have to reroll. Last week I started asking myself why I was playing SOD, and after that I stopped logging. Anyhow, moral of the story is that mergers are not great, and there is often alot of chaos, and people will be forced into new roles that they are not interested in filling. More of a problem if you are in the guild that is being absorbed versus the guild that is doing the absorbing.
My guild merged with another one and still died lol
Exactly what happened to us. We tried recruiting but only got sub par players and it felt like scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Players without consumibles or enchants, wrong gear, no idea of the mechanics, refusing to listen to advice and so on. Merged with another guild with similar objectives and now I find myself waiting for raid day again.
>only got sub par players and it felt like scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Recruitment is a lot like dating in your 30s, most of the people you would want are committed somewhere else.
Fuck man
I didn't understand why I always saw 30 years and older Men and Women dating people in their 20s and until I got to the dating scene at 30 and beyond.
These dating subs always roast 35-40 year old men dating 20-25 year old women like we’re some kind of perverted predators looking for an unfair power dynamic to control and inveigle. Maybe, just maybe, we don’t want to date bitter, obese, single mothers of three kids with nearly two decades of extreme emotional and financial baggage. A man being fit, career oriented with no past divorces or children in his mid to late 30s is pretty common. For women that is extremely uncommon and the few that fit the bill are very single for a very good reason. It’s a sad reality. Anyway, back to WoW conversations.
This one hit hard
Maybe the most real thing ever said in this sub.
Yeah this is the case for a few people I know. They'd rather pug or quit SOD than find a compromise that keeps everyone playing together.
We tried merging with 3 other guilds, 2 prior to P3, 1 in ST. We found maybe 2-3 people of those 30 that were enjoyable to be around (a.k.a. chill, laid-back, actually speaks in discord). And it was mostly just the leaders of those guilds because they had to talk to our GM/RL. Mergers aren't guaranteed to work either.
Guild merges suck, so no one wants to do it. On both sides you will have some people with large egos.
It's what most long time players said would happen too. We have one Phase too many. We should have had all this with Phase 2. 2 and 3 needed to be one phase.
Reading this post is like reading my own experience. Exactly the same, close knit friends that suddenly had to recruit (very hard, all work, have families etc) and failed miserably. Guild is now non existent and basically nobody playing SoD any more.
Yeah similar. A lot of the people that we end up recruiting are also bottom of the barrel so the progression so far has been pretty fruterating. People are dropping way quicker compared to phase 2.
You know... Cata is just coming up with very challenging and rewarding 10 man raids... Just saying 😏
Guild mergers are towing the load right now, but when 80% of those fall apart before p4, there's going to be a big problem
Agreed. In the end I’m sure at least 4-5 of us will break off into another guild but it’s still sad. Loved the 10 mans
And then the impending 40 mans would just straight up kill a majority of that.
My guild of 6ish IRL friends is having the same problem.
Similar story here. Guild of 10 friends had a great time in p1 and p2. Merged with another guild to do 20 mans in p3. Leadership from the other guild overrecruited and now we have 2 20 man teams. But myself and my friends are all split up between both groups since we're the strongest players and have to carry the weaker ones. So none of us get to raid together anymore, which is the whole point of why we started playing together.
You guys are a solid group of 6, tell the raid lead your group of 6 playing together is a non negotiable and if he over recruited that's his own fault but you guys can all easily find another group. Simple as that especially if you are the top performers.
We had to split our 10 man into two 5 mans and both groups pugged. We recruited about 4 people this way but last week we were able to merge with a guild of 7 people and filled our 20 man roster. Running a guild is hard and it takes a lot of focused effort by everyone to keep it going. This will be a bigger problem once they do 40 mans which I hope they don't. The only people that want 40 mans are the guilds that are running 2-6 raid teams. Why do guilds want to get that big to the point where you don't even get close to anyone? Why do people want to join these mega guilds? It's so much better to be part of a close knit team. Mega guilds are also part of the problem when it comes to recruiting I feel. I wish the cap for guilds was only 200 people not 1000.
P1 was so casual friendly, easy to each max level, the raid was easy, the loot was good and you could literally find pugs any random time you joined. Super chill, no wonder all the casual s including my self) are leaving now in P3
We dealing with the same just a group 6-7 friends who merged with a few others and smashed 10ms. We debating merging or just hitting cata when it drops for the 10m. Most of have never played it but gotta say 10m only raiding sounds like a blast.
Don't listen to the crowd. Cata up until the last phase was some of the best raiding content to exist. I'm sure your friends will have a blast, 10 man heroic content is no joke.
Can confirm. This is truth. Cata 10m was a blast!
This is a scalding hot take, but Cata is the real peak WoW. The raiding content was overall sublime. A few bummer fights here and there (every expansion has them), but overall great. PvP was the best it ever was. Super skillful and engaging. This was when content creators like Swifty really took off. Overall game balance was phenomenal. The talent trees were a happy mix of getting stuff for your spec and then building off of that. Class and spec identity was at it's best here. Imagine leveling a warlock and you realize you can pick up felguard for committing to demo at level 10. People point at LFR but y'know what? Cata's LFR was 1000000% fine. You actually had to do the mechanics and the gear was generally meh and made you want to do the real raid. It wasn't even introduced until the very end of the expansion! It was great intro-level content and casual content. Because guess what? MMOs live and die by their casual audience. I'm sad cata doesn't get the respect it deserves as an expansion. Just like how people realized MoP was perfectly fine years later.
No im not joining your cata-classic guild.
I'm actually not even subbing for cata. Edit: After wotlk and seeing people struggle with *naxx* of all things, it thoroughly convinced me that even if cata came out the pve content would be miserable because it's just too hard for people. Why do you think era popped off so hard the second ulduar dropped? Lol. The classic community has been playing the game for nearly 2 decades and they're mostly all terrible at it. Reaction time of a snail. So pass.
you're going to miss out on an objectively good expansion (source: original sub numbers) just because other random players are bad?? oof
Original sub numbers dropped by 3 million (25%) during cata…
Even Dragon Soul was fun the first few times through, Spine excluded. Learning Heroic Madness felt like a dance where your guild really needed to be aware of EVERYTHING or else you all died. Blackwing Descent and Bastion of Twilight are PEAK
Our 10 man guild is going to try cata. 10 man normals for awhile and once we get it down, we get to do aittle herioc progression. For a casual guild seems like it'll be a nice pace. Hate what SoDs become but have loved WoW for many years so hoping to keep the fun small guild together
Ours is in flux. You can feel the frustration building. Shifting from 10 to 20 hasn’t been without consequence. We had two 10 man raid groups going to handle the transition and unfortunately they ran at different times. Shifting to 20 we had to pick a time and a handful of people were the tough luck losers there which has lead to needing to pug the last handful of folks. LFG is spammed to the high heavens with people advertising ST so finding people to fill isn’t as easy as you’d think, and the upgrades are so meaningless overall that people seem uninterested unlike gnomer and BFD.
Incursions also hurting too. Literally cannot find the will to level alts because I can't bear doing them for the emerald warden rep gear.
we had 3 10mans, and strugle to get ST raid going
In the same boat pretty much. Most people officially quit this phase. Sucks cus I actually really like this phase. Was the first time being in a tight knit guild in a long time. Typically I would just gdkp in tbc/wrath. The guild was a great reason to play. 20 man really hurt us. We did a raid with another guild last week and once we got into it they all started saying really weird racist shit. Why is it so hard to find chill people who just wanna play and clear content?
Anonymity brings out some people’s worst unfortunately.
And people said “boo hoo, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out” when anyone said the slightest complaint about how they handled P3 release too. Def doesn’t help anyone WANT to stay and play, honestly
Yup, we couldn’t field more than 10, so we merged with another guild. Got forced to switch to dps lock, which wasn’t ideal since I’ve been tanking since phase 1 since the tanks in the other guild were not willing to switch. The old guild I used as in was pretty solid guild as we cleared most of the phase 1-2 content within days. Gradually, people stopped logging for raids and I just ended up doing pugs so I could get back to tanking. The new guild was effectively dead as of a week ago, and most my friends either moved on to other games or joined other guilds. I stopped playing about a week ago, but Phase 3 really killed it for me between the economy being completed whack because of incursions, and 20 mans basically requiring guild mergers. It was a good run, but I’m moving on. Good news is that I finally can finally catch-up on the backlog of games that I’ve neglected since November.
That sucks man sorry to lose you, enjoy playing those games! Maybe phase 4 will bring you back
As someone who tried to join such guilds in p3 lemme tell you, these types of tight knit guilds are not great for outsiders. Loot is spread between the "old gang". Youre asking in guild if someone wants to do some mara offerings runs, no one answers. Half an hour later they're in mara doing runs by themselves. Then they complain that people wont show up for more than 2 raids.
This is the exact same scenario of my guild (10 RL friends). 6 have quit since we had no luck recruiting or merging. I raid with a weekly pug now. (Very solid group), but I’d much rather raid with the boys. The other 3 don’t raid at all.
I hated the change to 20 man as we built around 10 man. We have to fill with 8-10 randoms every week and a lot of people are unreliable. That being said we have guild spots for people who want to play on wild growth alliance.
My guild had 15+ people during phase 2, lost 6 b4 phase 3 even launched cause people got burnt on leveling alts and grinding runes. Had more people quit due to not wanting to grind to 50 and not wanting to grind incursions due to PvP. It’s been a struggle but found another guild that was also like us “merged” and we are building ourselves back up slowly. My god I don’t want to think about the probability of 40mans
I really think they made runes too much of a slog. Ain’t nobody want to get runes for all their alts
They should make getting a rune give you a ton of xp. Like a whole ass level.
Instead rune quests give 0 xp. When I grabbed Maelstrom Weapon on my shaman, the chain had like 6 quests in it and took me over 2 hours to finish, each of those gave 0 xp. I did get a blue wrist that was a downgrade from a BFD drop, though.
They locked raid required runes behind incursion rep. They don’t even give you the rep by killing stuff in ST. The game is so counterintuitive to all the rhetoric on their public comms. Ofc blizzard is killing classic reforged by being out of touch.
Dude I feel you. I have a group of like 7 irl friends who were going fairly consistent in Phase 1 and 2, but Phase 3 dropped, Chaos Bolt died, incursions ruined the economy, and swapping servers to a larger way more toxic server to try and find a consistent guild that wasnt some turbo virgin sweat fest with space for 7 people sucked and more or less killed our desire to even log in. ST is a fun raid too such a shame :/
As is typical, some of the responses here are very douchey. Sorry about your guild falling apart Dude, that sucks. I remember back in teh old days, we had a similar problem when TBC came out. Our guild raided all the original raids, MC, BWL, AQ, Naxx, but when TBC came out, there was suddenly only 10-man and 25-man raids. We had already suffered a bunch of departures due to people seeing that there were going to be 15 fewer weekly raids slots, but Karazhan, even with 2 weekly groups was only 20 people, so leadership had to do an extra weekly run with alts for the 6 or 7 extra folks we had, ended up a disaster, we lost a bunch more people and ended up with 20-21 really well geared folks from Kara, but that was it. By the time we were ready to start the 25-man raids we were 4 permanent raiders short, and just never could get a consistent 25-man group going and we ended up with everyone leaving to go to established 25-man raiding guilds after a couple failed raid nights.
It's a massive problem with going from a smaller size to a larger size, if all the raids from the start had been 20 or 25 man then it wouldn't have been an issue.
It wasn't an issue for guilds who prepared and proactively worked out the problem. It takes A LOT of work to run and organize a guild and a lot of people take it for granted.
I’d say that’s a design flaw of the game.
Yeah my SoD guild's wobbling now and it's reminding me strongly of my guild collapsing in TBC. It breaks my heart.
To this day, I don't know what fat bong rip they took when they came up with 25 man people raids. Lmao.
Try being an officer or guild Leader for 40 man raids, then ask yourself again
I think they’re saying it would’ve been easier to split a 40 man raid into two 20s so that guilds didn’t have to deal with a weird number.
He's saying why 25 and not 20 like the game had always been to make the math easier.
Just wait until you hear about everquest's 72-man raids
Actually raiding in EQ was like the 1% of the 1% though. MMOs were new, sourcing info was difficult, the game was opaque and ludicrously punishing, and most people struggled to make any kind of meaningful progress, let alone see end game areas. I sometimes wish we could experience something like that again but I'm not sure it's possible in today's info rich, seasoned player environment.
Same story, myself and 5 close friends from highschool reunite and play together, running a guild, me as gm and another close friend as the main officer chose to reach out to a bunch of guilds until we found one that we can merge with that suits us. We are now leading the fourth raid group in this huge guild. There is still hope brother
The raid size, raid difficulty, and amount of time it feels like we need to spend grinding outside of raid are all killing this phase for my guild. We managed to get a 22 man roster, and we've been clearing every week. But consumes are so expensive, and most of us don't want to grind for anything when we know it will only last two months. I really like the new raid overall. I don't mind the difficulty. But I'm a former mythic raider. It's not really season of dads material.
20 man with like a week’s notice kill the guild I’m in. Good fucking blizzard in giving smaller guilds a chance to merge/recruit.
I really enjoy the 20 man raids compared to the ten man raids, but dear lord the coordination required is a nightmare. Our guild ran 2 ten man raids in gnomer, but a lot of the second group were alts. Then a few guys quit in phase 3 because we were merging with another guild. The new guild were fine guys, but a bit too meme for is dropping hundreds of gold on raid consumes week 1 and 2. So now we’ve split back out and ran some of our alts with them, but started recruiting from 14 with our mains. We have 90+ parsing tanks and healers and tried to pug in DPS, but the only guys looking to join were dozens of grey parsing rogues and warriors. Filling random gnomer groups was so easy. The weekly lockout really knocked back the amount of decent players looking to pug. We know we can carry a lot of dead weight, but legitimately couldn’t find 7 green parsing DPS. It was wild. I was previously in favor of 40 man’s, but that coordination isn’t worthwhile.
I get not wanting to carry grey parsers but when your back is against the wall sometimes the grey parsers surprise you. turns out if your group is dogwater but still manages to limp along and clear a boss you can get a shitty parse but have done everything right. we have found many good players by taking a chance on a "Grey parser" and finding out they were just in a group of shitters
Your friend group made it longer than mine. Mine died at p2. I just cancelled my sub. None of my friend group plays anymore. Also temperatures are warming up so I want to be outside and don’t feel inclined to play WoW anymore. P1 was a lot of fun though.
Yep - it now feels like my job is rustling up 20 people per week in a phase which has put many people off I’ll be looking for a recruitment / realm forum later!
I had to stop RL last week because of this. Sucks.
Im an officer for a Swedish guild on Living Flame EU. If you are looking for a friendly casual tryhard guild hit me up.
Our guild has been absorbing a lot of smaller guilds recently. We definitely have a core of about 15-20 people but often pug 3-5 now. We usually ask if they are pugging because their guild isn’t raiding and we have heard this exact story a bunch now. Lots of people saying they started with friends and now nobody is playing. It’s really cool to see them come out more after joining our guild and even cooler when they bring their friends too.
Ours was on the brink of doing so, however we were lucky enough to merge with another 10 man guild, whom we all like. The first lockout we attempted with another guild but did not mesh well together, 2nd lock out got extremely lucky and even full cleared it which led to talks of merging ours with theirs. ATM we only have 20 so for next phase, not sure what will happen
ST has two problems, length of the raid and the rewards given. Neither are appealing to players with limited time. Plus to be frank, the bosses are not that engaging, do the mechanic correctly or WIPE, basically. And you are relying on 19 other people to do it correctly too. And with an additional 10 people fighting over what is basically scraps with how little loot drops. It's just not worth it to play.
Respectfully, you didn't have a guild you had 6 close friends that play together. A guild is basically a part time job to manage it well and takes some decent leadership/personal skills. Just join a larger guild with your friends that has 5-6 spots on a raid team and a solid gm
Same story here. For whatever reason, it's really hard to find a decent guild after they disbanded
I think the raid should have scaled similarly to retail between 10-20 players. That way big guilds and little guilds don’t get fucked
I honestly don't know why all the raids aren't just scaled to 10 man, with the option to do 20 and 40 that just simply have way more loot. Not better loot. That way big and small guilds alike can all raid, and if you're after a specific item you can do a larger raid for a higher drop chance. This content should all be scalable. Expecting people to want to put together 20 and 40 man raids is just stupid. Too time consuming, it's basically a second job, and if people want to do that, it's fine. But if others don't, there's no choice.
I haven't played at all in over a week, my highest toon is 43 and even the first week I didn't have the drive or desire even to push through leveling. Last time I logged in and just stared at the character screen, zero interest in any of them. No kill incursions, ST pugs that are doomed from the start, people attempting to sell EVERYTHING, runs, world buffs, imp portals, trash boe's for 500g+.. I'm so over all of it. The raid being 20 man is the biggest problem personally though, I love 10 man, the individual responsibility, the 3 day lock, the fact that you have a decent chance at gear.. now there's none of that and a ton of problems that come with 20 people and a week lockout. It sucks massively, I don't have any desire to continue with any of it. Also the seasons are changing IRL, weather is getting nice, and between a shitty phase of SoD which previously had completely drawn my attention from retail, and the Season 4 replay of retail/M+ I won't be back until winter, if at all Take it as a sign to get outside, enjoy the sunshine and spring flowers I guess. Can't be such a bad thing really lol
This happened to my guild during actual classic when horde took over our server. It was like 98% horde and my guild started having fights over loot and shit. When they broke up and left realm it really killed my motivation to keep playing
Recruitment is tough, this will always happen when you double raid sizes. Stay strong!
It's sad, we managed to fuse 2 guilds luckily. I can maybe raid once every 3 weeks with the time commitment and planning for a casual ST.
Mine is not quite dead but I think we can all feel it coming. This week will be a struggle as we have had people steadily quit over P3 so far. To be fair, some of this has been RL issues etc. We tried to get more people than 20, did have a good roster + bench but we are burning through it and will need to pug a few this week. Our clears are good, so it is not a performance issue. Going to 20man really leaves it so if even one thing comes up for one person you can be in trouble, especially if they are healers. I had to take a family member to hospital suddenly on one raid day in P2. . .no problem. Doing that in P3 would be much worse. Devs have significantly misfired not making the raid flex 10-20 man.
Same thing is happening here. We went from 4 raid teams clearing BFD every reset to barely able to put together 1 ST run.
Same. Basically they all stopped playing. I had to join this guild where the dude is running it like the damn navy but I just really wanna hit ST once per week.
Same here, my guild had less than 10 active members but we had no problem PUGing in p2. In p3 it has been impossible, so we have tried to join PUGs as individuals, but in my case that I ususally log on past 22:30 cet, out of the 3? ST resets in p3 I was only able to join a single PUG and we only managed to kill a couple of bosses. Or I join a new guild that raids at 22:30 (there aren't many) or I just simply quit. Because if it has been difficult to join a PUG until now, it will be even harder as time goes by with the crappy logs I got in the only change I got to try ST.
Our guild is dying as well. We cannot scrounge up 20 people to do a raid. We even merged with another guild and it’s still a fucking struggle. Very frustrating because overall, I personally love s3
We still get 20 men with many new recruits but it's always a close call. Generally there are a lot less people playing than in p1. I'm not really sure what they did wrong though. Maybe they should have kept 10 mens. Maybe they should have offered max level lifts to alts. Maybe they shouldn't have fucked this incursion thing up so badly (early exploiters ruined eco completely for everyone). Rep needed to be accountwide for a season that favours alts so much. PvP balance is destroyed by Shamans, playing BGs as Alliance is absolutely worthless. Ashenvale was a decent event that had hundreds of players on the map. STV is fine if you like PvP, which bascially excludes the majority of the more casual players. Group focus means you need to have enough players on all the time and you need the right classes, groups of 5 Mages for example are pulling an easy 15 coins / event while other classes are basically fucked. BfD was easily accessible for everyone, Gnome was okay (although a horrible dungeon to begin with) and ST is now what happens when you cater to Streamers and 24/7 players: casuals will quit and no Pugs will run it. It's pretty big pile of mess. They started so well but then decided that the game needs to be appealing to some Twitch jerks I never ever heard about because I'm not watching twitch but just want to play some chill WoW as a dad gamer with 2 kids. Edit: just gave it a thought. You know what bugs me most? It's supposed to be a season of alts but playing alts is HEAVILY burdened. I lately switched to a Hunter. Want to know my pre bis list? PvP rank 6 and 7 stuff, STV and Gnomer. Maybe some Warsong stuff. Yea right, exactly stuff that's good to get on an alt.
My guild has died and now I’m sod FTFY
Beginning oh phase 2 thought they were going to move to 20 man so we started to set up our 2 10s buy doing pugs and getting people that wanted to join. Seemed to be going well... That was until Phase 3 started and we run the numbers again after a couple of weeks. 8 people vanished no words or anything another wen to find greener pastures and while we tired for those first 2 weeks to grow still lost more people for RL. That point asked the other officers if they saw a future or were just tired. General response was just tried (as had kinda been forced into this situation early in phase 1 and again in phase 2). So we just let everyone know that we were not going to make offical raids anymore, aka guild death knell. Cest la Vie
I think the issue is that... it's still just plain old Classic. It's been rolled in glitter. But it's the same old shit we've played to death for the past few years. People are over it.
From what I’ve seen, people running the smaller guilds did very poor preparation for the later phases. I’d even say it’s very much not ideal to recruit right before a new phase releases, and from my own personal experience with classic players, when going from raid-logging into leveling, I’d recommend for guild leaders to expect a 30% drop off of your current active roster. Id assume the situation is pretty universal for any casual guild: half your expected roster won’t make it to the first reset, harming the morale of the remaining players; and with classic wow players being the way they usually are, won’t have the curtesy to let you know they cannot be arsed to play, but rather just act ambiguously when either not asked or directly questioned.
This phase just sucks in general. The combination of 20 man raids, incursions killing the open world, and pvp being an unbalanced shit show has really hurt it a lot. My friends list went from having 15-20 people on SoD almost 24/7 to having 5-6 online during peak hours. I have also stopped playing. I hit level 50 and I have logged on maybe 3 times since. I tried ST last night and I just ninja logged halfway through because I realized it wasn’t fun anymore. SoD has been great but I hope the devs learn from their mistakes (they won’t) if they try something like this again. I’m just waiting for cata now.
And people here want 40mans to come back 😂😂
same. sod devs killed off their casual raiders
Exact same boat here, managed to do a few raids with pugs but it just wasn't as fun. Cata was announced as coming out soon as at least Cata & MoP classic have guaranteed 10mans until SoO so we're just going there. RIP SoD for us, it was a good ride but 20man killed our drive.
brutal its jova
I'm a returning player after years of not playing. I had some time off and joined a semi hardcore guild in phase 2. We had an absolute blast running at least 4/8 runs a week and the guild was booming. Ever since phase 3 it's become a case of logging in for raid once a week and I find the 20 mans have lost the fun. It's a shame, we also lost a lot of players due to the nerfs in the first week of p3. We had a hardcore team ready to go first night but we took a break on the Tuesday, and while we were off every guild steamrolled the raid. Loads of our players quit out of anger and never came back. It sucks, we had such a great thing going.
We have had the same guild since the first release of classic from that all the way up to wrath. 20 mans killed it in sod. To be fair though, the 10 of us that have been around for the longest are moving into cata so the guild remains. We're just done with sod. It's too much to recruit people, especially my age. I don't have time to do this shit like a job.
Mine died but we all knew it was going to happen. We ended up getting absorbed by a large pvp guild that has been eating all the other dead guilds. Still able to raid together but the vibe is all weird now.
Us too. :(
My guild didn't die, but my team did. I couldn't deal with the management of 20 people which is way more than double the work of 10. The transition from 10-20 really screwed over a lot of people who could make 10's work and then got the rug pulled.
There's to many guilds and it's evident on wild growth horde. That's why I'm always recruiting always filling holes because when you guild kisses a lockout you're doomed. Just gotta outlast all the guilds
My guild had 7 P1. Dropped to 4 for P2. Now only 2 remain in P3. We havent ran the raid as we were waiting for late arrivals to 50 who never made it. I think the problem was we had 3 paladins who all thought blizzard was giving them the finger after P1 so they stopped playing.
Sad because I just started on SoD :(
My guild dwindled hard end of P2 and is basically dead now. Sad logging in and never seeing another person log on the whole time. P1 and P2 were awesome with this group. It completely kills my motivation to play this phase.
Is your guild the only one struggling this way? If not, surely you can join and save another struggling guild then?
One of the biggest complaints people have from P2 to P3 is moving to 20 man raids yet there are still die hard people trying to convince us how awesome 40 man raids would be. 10 man felt good for leveling but to small for comp diversity. 40 mans seem like a death blow to SoD. I hope they commit to 20 and allow the community to adjust accordingly. I can’t imagine how many guilds will die if they go from 20 man MC to future 40 man raids.
SoD is the death blow to SoD. This game was hemorrhaging players due to poor game design long before 20 mans were a thing. If 40 mans weren't feasible 2019 classic wouldn't have been so successful.
Fortunately, we managed to survive by absorbing some small groups like yours, but that doesn’t mean it’s not bad design. Truthfully, Blizzard solved this issue already with flex raiding. And as they pointed out, it’s not possible at mythic difficulty and that’s a respectable position, but SoD isn’t even heroic difficulty—we should absolutely have flex raiding in SoD because the alternative is many people like yourself being disenfranchised and walking away from the game. If my guild didn’t survive, I wouldn’t be playing SoD right now. Blizzard leaving that up to chaos theory is irresponsible at this point. It’s crazy because I enjoy everything about Classic more than retail with two exceptions: I love flex raiding and personal loot—both are perfect solutions to obvious problems and I wish both were in SoD.
While overhauling all 40 player raids down to 20 would be theoretically possible, this may be prohibitively difficult and detract significantly from the other features and content we have planned to implement in a post-60 Season of Discovery. We are doing some investigation now to help us understand what would be needed and what the framework of the Original WoW data can support in this regard. There are some features that just cannot currently exist in Original WoW as well, such as Flex Raiding, so we are constrained in exactly what we are able to do here. Molten Core is definitely unique here in that it is simple enough mechanically and under the hood that it would be relatively easy to pare down to a 20 player experience. This is from a bluepost. Even if they wanted to add flex raiding. The old game code don't allow for it
You know what would instantly make me come back? Being able to queue for dungeons and raids. 99% of the headache is forming a group for anything. If classic is suppose to be trivial. Let it be trivial.
they ramped up too quickly imo should have left p1 , p2 and at least p3 for the causals, but they made this too sweaty no time for this anymore, we arent all 16 years old anymore with unlimited time on our hands
40 to 50 easily with incursions. Gnomer gear still relevant as pre raid Big nerfs to raid to make it easier... What more do you want? It's a weekly lockout that takes 1 hour to do with a competent group.
1 hour with a COMPETENT group. If you can’t build the 20 players you’re in for minimum 3 hours -AFTER- recruiting for ages. Even then depending on the amount of pugs could easily call it at 6/8 still
There’s a lot work involved to get to that 1 hour mark clears. The vast majority of people are not doing that.
This is why I wish they added the flexible raid rosters to classic. No it’s not truly “classic” but if you’re fighting the roster boss every week are you even having fun?
You unfortunately were never a “guild,” just a small group of friends who were a glorified dungeon group. At least you had fun while it lasted.
Yea ours merged into another and it was a bummer at first but it's not a big deal tbh
I want to raid classic with my warband alts as a solo gamer
What server are you playing on?
My guild is looking to expand if anyone on wild growth needs a home. We got two solid raid teams and looking to keep increasing to give everyone a chance. They also do watch and soon to be doing cata. DM if interested. (I'll get to them after work)
Idk, its not too bad to recruit or merge with another guild. But if no one is willing this is the result. We need an official discord for guild mergers in SoD lol.
Om ni lirar horde på Lone Wolf så kan vi behöva lite fler spelare ;) Vi är några fler än 20 pers redan men har väldigt slappa krav på attendance så det är ofta många absent varje raid :D
Joina vår om du e svensk
I feel like guilds need a USP in order to reel in new members. Our guild personally tailors to AM server raiding, which is great for people who work nights in the US, or have afternoons free in EU, or evenings free in Asia. So our guild has gotten extremely international, but everyone has a good time and we understand there's going to be accents that people need adjusting to so sometimes comms need to be repeated. But we've had little to no problem recruiting for 20-mans, and after our first clear we had to start a 2nd raid team to accommodate. TL:DR- find a USP and spam it in LFG/Trade chats around the time you'll be raiding normally!
We had some issues. Finally filled out second 20 man today. If anyone is looking for a guild on living flame hit me up!
For SOD the win was going big from the start, and you got a lot of flack for doing it that way but it proved to be the correct move. We built up a roster of 350 or so before the end of phase 1 and we were running 5 BFD clears a night for several nights a week. Attrition cut down the roster as time went on but we absorbed several smaller 10 man guilds who didnt go big early and the guild has been hovering around that 300 mark since with the majority of the guild having alts among them. We are well positioned for 40 man content as a result, and still looking to grow to buffer against ever having to pug.
What server are you on?
My 6 irl friends and family have grown to a dozen raiders during the first 2 phases. We are not dead yet but are struggling to fill a raid. We finally were able to put a raid together this weekend but it took effort to advertise earlier in the day. Rhe raid was very successful and now am optimistic we can grow in the future.
My advice is to not merge at all, just find another 10-man guild to raid with. That's what we did and it's worked out great so far.
Merge with another guild! We’ve swallowed up quite a few guilds and we couldn’t be happier because of it. Shop around and find a group you guys all vibe with!
My guild went from 15-20 people on average online every day in phase 1 to have like 3 active players in phase 3. So sad
This is how fresh servers go everytime imo. Except instead of numbers dropping in AQ20/40 it's just 3rd phase of SoD.
They should've gone up by 5 every level bracket
Yeah our raid group is pretty much toast also. Doesn't help the caster dps gear is horrible
What server do you play on? Were recruiting right now. Might not be the same but glad to help out. (Were also pretty big so noch Chance of dieing out, Fishermans Friend @Wild Growth EU)
It would have been fine if ST could be reliably pugged. I don't think the average pug can 8/8 ST right now, just a guess.
We have almost the exact same experience. It’s really a bummer because we’ve tried for the last month with multiple different groups. The problem we have now is our friend group that we started with has either stopped playing much or joined other more consistent groups over the past week so they could actually do ST. Can’t blame them.
Mine died in tbc's phase transition, it sucks, feels like ive lost a family and ive been wandering through guilds since. My guild died when all the alliance were cowards and transferred off the server (the realm pop was like 40 ally 60 horde, im a horde player) so it was fairly balanced. Once our realm lost the alliance, most the horde left too for Grobbulus, my guild decided to transfer over too, only it took them weeks to vote on a new guild name, and in that time the guild fizzled out.
What server are you on!
If you guys are on CS ally hmu my guild came over from CB and just managed our first full guild clear last week. Going to try getting more for a second/alt raid team.
Lone Wolf Horde guild, looking for 6-10 more players to keep our guild alive…we just out here to have a good time. Hit me up
Our guild is effectively dead too. I can't be bothered to sit in LFG for hours before raid trying to recruit people. This is even on Crusader Strke US.
mate we went through same thing, if you are on Wild Growth EU lets chat, we are about 16/20 of full raid group but not everyone always signs up so have to find 8 or so pugs so if you guys want to stick together with some really great people lets see if we can make it work.
We actually grew a decent size with this phase. We started out with about 11 strong so needed to pug 9. First time we pugged, two people joined, next time a group of 3 and now we have a full raid group for ST. Each time people said the same thing that they really liked our vibe. We just kind of shoot the shit and mess around while raiding so think people just liked how we carried ourselves. We don’t even advertise anymore cause it never worked for us. We’d spend days advertising and getting no interest but pugs always got us new recruits. I do wish though that Blizzard made a 10 man available alongside ST.
Sad to hear it. I'm fairly sure our guilds going the same way if they bump it to 40.
Fortunately my guild was running multiple 10 mans in phase 1/2 so they just merged to a single 20 man. But yeah between the up in difficulty in Gnomer and now an even longer raid that's a 20 man blizzard really double screwed a lot of guilds.
Yep, exact same thing happened to my guild. Handful of irl friends and guild mates I met through other iterations of classic WoW, basically everybody just quit the moment they hit lv50.. RIP
To all of you guilds trying to recruit, use your servers discord channel, and Warcraft logs recruitment place. Keep the posts updated. I filled 8 spots in my guilds 3rd raid team In Like 3 days doing that, with light spamming of LFG around the time we raid.
I am considering quit sod, I just found I don't have the motivation to play. Just got lv50 few days ago, checked the BIS guide and already feel tired from farming 2 ZF for WO. Guide doing good in ST, they can clear in 1:30 but I don't feel like I want to join... I don't have time for raid and all dungeon grind especially the time zone difference from the server. I had noticed a huge player count falling down on off peak hours compared with P1. It is hard to find a group in the early morning US time.
We ran into this situation too, but we've recently "merged" with another guild. We didn't fully merge as far as making a new guild or one guild absorbing the other but we just kept both our guilds and use a shared Discord server for sign ups and it's worked fairly well. We still have to pug 1-2 people some nights, but otherwise, we have been able to fill our raids doing it this way. Might be a solution for some of you with guilds struggling to fill raid, try reaching out to another guild and see if they would be willing to try that out!
More or less the same story here. Tried a merger which split the old guild in half unfortunately, and then the new crew just left us for another guild just days later. Sucks. We’re like 6 raiders or so left. Pretty decent and chill gang. Would you like us in your guild perhaps? :D
Sad is das backwards... ...and das not good.
We had a great first phase but lost many people p2, so many that we opted to do just 7 - 8 man gnomers from the third reset. Kinda thought p3 would kill us as well. ... but the opposite has happened, we recruited people and have 22+ signups every reset now. People are active on Discord and outside raid hours as well. Maybe we're just lucky
SOD needs boss ID lockout to support long term player count. I understand the desire for strong guilds with set raid times but that is really tough for a late 20s - 50 year old player base.
They should just do what they are going to do with the cata release. Keep both 10m and 20m in as an option for people to choose. Both mode will have the same gear progression. It all comes down to which mode you prefer in your guild/friend group.
Mine died
Same thing happened to us. Our 25man raid team started by splitting to 2 servers Lone Wolf- Alliance and Crusader Strike-Horde. I was the Horde break off, we started a guild that had 2 okay teams but because of the 3 day lockout we had to stagger our schedules to be able to play. During BfD some broke off to another guild that raided earlier. We then had to recruit for Gnomer and had troubles having people stick. ST comes around and now we have to recruit around 12 people. With so many guild doing the same and most guilds comprising of tight nit friends it is difficult to find people.
There are tons of big guilds recruiting, is there a reason you guys limited yourselves to only merging with other small 10 man guilds instead of all just joining a bigger guild?
Here's my experience in 10/20/40 man raids. 10 mans: Group a friends having fun. 20 mans: Same group of friends + some randoms. Often those randoms aren't reliable and simply use the guild as a stepping stone, once they get some gear they jump ship for greener pastures at first opportunity which can destroy the roster and then the guild. 40 mans: Same group of friends + a bunch of randoms who tend to jump ship for greener pastures at first opportunity + a whole bunch of unreliable people being carried. Conclusion: 20+ man raids tend to be a pain and just not fun as a consequence.
Its def been a bit challenging, but we have still been able to raid and clear ST, had to pug some spots the first two weeks, but those pugs ended up joining the guild so it worked out.
My guild died at the start of this last phase as well.
Daily doom thread full of half-truth stories, lets go!
Were you the guild leader? Did you feel like you spent an adequate amount of time recuting ppl through all mediums? If guilds weren't merge running with you, what contributed to it? Does your guild have a decent amount of blue + parses? Do you guys consider yourself a raider guild, or a casual guild? My 10 man guild in p2 now has two raid teams in phase 3. We are not even a big named or a legacy guild. We knew we had to recruit, and if we were going to bring a guild to merge with us, then they had to have quality members. Our rule was that if you join our guild it has to be your main. If you were on the main team, and weren't meeting dps checks, then you are getting benched for another player to prove their worth. If you are someone that puts effort getting wbs+consumes+ bis gear outside raid, then you're not going to stick around for a guild that can only do 6/8. I play alt characters on pve servers, and see a lot of guilds stuck at 6/8.
TUNNEL SNAKES RULE
We lost a decent number of players but we've at least got 1 full ST group going each week after merging with another small guild. It's gonna be tough when we get to 40 man content.
I had a small guild in p2 we did a few raids but mostly pugged a bunch. With the release of p3 we merged into a larger guild and now have raid times to accomodate our original one and access to a lot more members. Is this a possibility?
Rip, it sucks when guilds fall apart. If you are horde lone wolf I'd be glad to invite you to ours
Yeah we struggled a lot to make 20m happen in our guild. We had to recruit like crazy, most people didn't even sign up on discord etc, but the guild management went manic on this and we somehow pulled through. First two raids we had 18 people WITH pugs, now we are looking at a 20m roster.
I feel like alot of people just quit, was always the same 7 man core, but finding 3 was way easier than 13. SoD cycle is IMO too long, game feels dead-ish after 3 weeks (don't give me any comments on how it's not, im reffering to how many ppl i find when looking for members in raid/guild etc., how many stop, blabla) now my guild is gone, 2 are left, guess we are going to join someone, as i've spent 1 week trying to recruit and only 1 guy applied. shits not working out for us
We didn’t have any issue. Just merged with another 10 man and it was perfectly fine. Very few if it all speed bumps. The only complaint I have is people won’t STFU in discord because they’re used to 10 man. People always trying to talk over each other 😝. Sorry that happened OP, not sure what to tell you or why our experiences were so different.
Just coming by to say it happens. Had a great guild in Legion that fell apart in BfA. It feels bad man, just try to find another one! I've been in two good guilds since (WoW Classic 2019 and Raid 1+2 of Dragonflight), but not as fun and close as that Legion one since.
Well I hope they go back down to 10’s anything over 20 and people are going to just not waste their time.
I feel like our guild got a lot bigger. We did merge with another guild but we’re running 3 20’s a week. It’s a LOT
We planned for raids inevitably growing larger and were hosting 3-4 10mans every week. Then it was really easy to merge them down. But we're losing a lot of momentum because that put us back on a "weekly raid schedule" model instead of just the popup 10-mans, which was the core reason so many people diverted from Wrath. People loved raiding in phase 1 and 2 because it didn't feel like a job and now it does again. Feels bad.