The big question; to rawfle and other leading members

Come 4.1 there will be a new feature in place that will allow us as a guild to selectively look for people to join. We set the rules and the advertising and then selectively allow people in.

Obviously I think we should do this or I wouldn't have posted this, if we took out all the people that don't play anymore we would probably only have around 25 active members, and every other week or so it seems we lose another member. I have been posting all over the wow related forums here trying to bring people in but that's not really moving things, since the wow forums here are typically dead.

If it would make people feel better in order for them to access our foums they will have to become gb members, so we would actually be helping our site out and bring them new members potentially.

This isn't just for raiders though it'll be nice to finally fill in a second ten man or even get a 25 man going, it's just for the general health of the guild. I don't mean we open the flood gates for people; that would be silly, we aren't playing a numbers game, but maybe we can over time double our active membership.

Also I don't mean we pull just 85s. Truth be told I would rather we don't recruit 85s at all. I want time to see their play style and I want to see what kind of person they are, and I certainly don't want someone in that feels entitled just cause they are max level or well geared. Anyone that meets our guidelines, don't be a dick, join Giantbomb and have fun should be let in.  

Nothing really for try outs. Just if we run a dungeon with them and we wipe and they flip out we know they aren't for us. They're for the Assazzinzxx

Keep in mind this fact though, as I've seen this happen with many guilds over the years. The more outside people you bring in that aren't a part of the original group, the more drama you create. Its usually exponential, and it usually results in a ton of the original members leaving because of all the drama that the new members are causing, over loot or over just general guild policies. Like for example, consider that we have a more or less wide open guild bank policy. Once we start bringing in outside people, that has to go away. Right now everyone in the guild shares a sort of common thread, and once you lose that people don't have it to work from to try and settle differences and problems. We'll also require a full officer system with kick privileges if we're gonna do this. The guild needs to be a lot more structured and resistant to the most common types of griefers and drama queens out there. 

I'm not sure if most of us really would have an issue with the guild becoming more structured. At least in my mind structured doesn't equal authoritarian. Being able to weed out people we don't want and keep the ones we do should be the ultimate goal for all of us.

If we do that job correctly then drama shouldn't follow, and frankly I won't have any problems giving someone the boot if they start creating issues. Really we would be like a hardcore raiding guild only instead of gear and fight knowledge our requirements would be everyone thinking your nit going to create problems.

All of this is hypothetical at the moment but I would suggest the core group of Bomb Squad, not just the raiders but anyone that contributes to the guild regularly and is a consistent presence should be made officers and after we let a person in it's majority vote at anytime to kick them from the guild by those officers.

Then we leave the bank open to all officers and they can distribute stuff from it for the new members.

If at anytime we find that diamond in the rough that contributes and is helpful we can add them to the officers if we want.

This way we maintain the current guild structure and insulate ourselves from drama and grief, hopefully.

As for the common thread and becoming more hardcore towards raiding, we can solve both by requireing people that want to raid to make an account here and get access to the forums. That exposes them to Giantbomb and allows us sustained contact with them.

Though I was also thinking we might want to keep these forums as almost our officer forums and use a free forums service for the new members. To not push our welcome on Andy.

Again I'm not talking floodgates here, maybe 20 more people over the course of a few months. Keep our numbers stable and all. I know some of you are just rocking alts for this guild but I also know a lot of you are also running this as your main and I sure don't want to have to find a new home!

For the officers I mean current members be made officers. Not just anyone that contributes from here on out, if you catch my drift.

Yeah, its one of those problems community driven guilds have isnt it? do we advertise as a casual guild to keep the atmosphere in the guild similar to what it is now or advertise as a raiding guild and become a hardcore progression guild?

• DKP System
• A far more serious raid environment, no more of this kidding around in raid constantly, people aren't gonna stand for that shit
• Real pushes for progression, no one is going to bother with it if we're not constantly pushing the edge
• A ranking of raiders: trials, raiders, veterans, and elites, based on attendance and DPS requirements so that we have a way of judging who we bring in instead of this clusterfuck we have now
• And quite possibly an extension to a fourth day.

From my experience, making things more 'organized' makes things even more disorganized. If it were me, I would keep things as they are, but if we do recruit at all, recruit to fill a 25 man raid. 25 fights are more forgiving for mixed raider and casual groups, especially when our current raiders seem generally at gear level to carry, so nobody will miss out on the boss kills they're used to, which can happen when the guilds raiders are split. Running multiple groups causes more problems than it solves, from painful experience.

This seems to be taken as a direct attempt at getting more raiders, and while that would be nice it's not the up front goal.

I don't see why we can't have more people join just to have more people to run dungeons with or pvp with. Through that progress some more raiders will come out. Besides Troidy none of us in the raid group would have called ourselves anything but casual.

This is more a general health of the guild thing. Since I have started keeping track of the guilds 85's gear levels we have lost 11 Members. Where before we had 17 people telling us they were interested in raiding we now only have 13 that show up, and that's only most the time.

We used to have 12 people under 85 but regularly on and leveling, now that's down to 4.

If any weekend me and Nye don't show up or babbles and leus computer blow up or rawfle and thrawn have a school crunch we probably won't be running any type of raid at all.

We are slowly but definitely dying.

This is why I said I don't want 85s recruited in but people lower than that, by having to level in our guild our culture will rub off on them, we will get to know them and it'll give us time to organize any sort of end game spot for them.

I know I have been heavy on trying to get the 2nd 10 man up, but that's a pipe dream now, I'm just trying to keep us becoming a 12 member guild then dying out.

I certainly feel supers concerns, really if the new members can't live with how we raid or play they are out. We can keep looking for people that fit who we are not us change for them.

Besides makin some changes to structure to allow us to have a quick ability to rid ourselves of bad people and locking the bank down I don't see Any reason for us to change anything else.

When I said we have lost 11 members I mean 11 people out of the original 26 people we had at 85 i was tracking have stopped logging in. Not including pownce, Larso, enemykite or Golas.

I'm still thinking about this one. Like bcjohnnie said, I wouldn't want the guild to lose its identity, but if it's necessary for the guild's continued sustainability, then we'll find a way to bring in new people without too much disruption. We may need to specifically recruit people who understand that this is casual raiding, and are willing to play in the atmosphere we've created. I'm sure those people are out there. It's kind of a funny idea, though: recruiting people based on their ability to be laid-back. It reminds me of how the Penny Arcade guys described their hiring process: "We're basically hiring somebody to be our friend."

Ahh, I get what youre saying. 

 The problem with recruiting for casual raiding is that to most people out there casual raiding means they can fuck off and not do their best. That is not what we're looking for. We run a casual schedule sure, but we're certainly not having anyone struggling with the mechanics or anything. There's a very thin line between being casual and still caring about whats going on, and the super-casuals, those people who give up the second we wipe, and we've all seen that type in heroics.

" Yeah, its one of those problems community driven guilds have isnt it? do we advertise as a casual guild to keep the atmosphere in the guild similar to what it is now or advertise as a raiding guild and become a hardcore progression guild?
Casuals arent going to fill raid spots but regular raiders is going to require an overhaul of guild policies...
Honestly, I see this is a community guild for whiskey members and their friends, as it might be, and if I or anyone else wants a more hardcore raiding experience its probably better to join a progression guild and have a character on this guild for the funsies. I say that because recruiting raiders means all the "niceness" we have going will probably be brushed aside in favor of "fairness" and quite a few people wont be as comfortable as they are right now... I know I wont be.

That being said, if we were to recruit it will probably have to be more than just the guild finder, with interviews etc as troidy suggested, just to make sure we arent recruiting assholes (not the good kind like ryan, larso and babble... i mean REAL assholes lol)

I dont know, its tough... part of me wants new fun people to have raid with us, but the other part doesnt want to risk it. hehe



"

Regardless of whether you intend to recruit for raiding or not, you can't just up and say you can't give this influx of new members the choice whether they want to take raiding seriously. Inevitably some of these people will want in on raiding. If it's one or two, then that's cool: rotating people in and out still works. But what if there's 5? or 10? Rotating ceases to work in that case, with so many people at square one for raiding gear. From there you have to make a descision about how raiding will work with an influx of new members. Do you deny these new people completely? There's only so much someone can be knocked back from something widely seen as a whole-guild activity, no matter how laid back they are. You'd essentially be recruiting them for window dressing and make guild chat more active, and thus recruiting is a total waste of time in the first place. Do you rotate out more established raiders for new, ungeared players? Do you make a second 10 man group, splitting the geared raiders between the two? Do you run a 25 man? All of these things will inevitably rub different people the wrong way and disturb the current guild balance, especially since you guys seemed like a fairly tight-knit group that worked well together before I started raiding with you. These are questions you will eventually have to answer, regardless if you're recruiting for raiding or not.

@Thrawnkkar said:

Just at our current pace, we'll be only a raid group and 350 inactives by summer. :P

I'm at work so the response will be short, but if we end up with 5 to 10 that want to raid we absolutely run a second raid, we already have 4 people that are 350+ geared regularly rotated in and out for raids and they would make a far superior core than what our raid group had when we started downing raid bosses, most of us had a few greens on our first halfus drop.

I have a special dark place in my heart for split groups, but maybe that's just me. You could say it hits close to home :P

In any case, I'm not so much arguing against recruiting though as putting forward some fears for consideration, is all.

I would agree that our long-term goal should be a 25-man group if we can ever manage it. Two 10 mans seem like they would just divide the guild.

I'm also on board for a 25 man, but at the moment we don't even have 25 active members. :p

I would rather 25 mans for the most part I think.

The main reason two 10 mans cause an absolutely massive problem is overlap if they happen at different times of the week. If we barely manage to squeeze out 2 10 mans, one of the two groups is gonna be missing people and end up pulling from the other groups pool and getting those people saved. As far as Im concerned if we dont run them at the exact same time, we should wait for a 25 man.

If we're talking about wanting more people to become a casual guild again (instead of recruiting people specifically for raiding, which ultimately turns us into something of a raiding guild), I feel like we've already seen that come and go in this guild. I imagine most Giant Bomb members who would want to join Bomb Squad have already, and either they gave up early (because they realized even a Giant Bomb guild won't make them like WoW), they stopped at 85 (because the endgame can't sustain their interest), or they've stuck around, and the only people who stick around are now actively raiding.

I don’t know if I would consider myself a leading member, but I will throw in my thoughts on this subject anyway. I also talk mostly about raiding because I sense that it is one of the major reasons as to why the subject of possibly recruiting came up.  Also I am kind of tired so I hope this makes sense. Maybe I should also mention that this is Galv, just in case some of you didn’t know, seeing as I haven’t posted much on these forums.

When it comes to recruiting, I am neither for it nor against it. Many of the reasons for this have all ready been stated. I think it would be sad to see the guild lose its identity, but I don’t want to see the guild slowly waste away.

I see that a big question is how would we describe ourselves when recruiting. Casual? Hardcore? I might have mentioned it before in chat, but I came from a casual guild that tried casual raiding, and my guild ran into problems. My old guild problems were slightly different that our current ones though. We simply didn’t have enough people that could reliably meet the raid time each week (we tried to raid once a week, on Fridays, for several hours, and seeing as this was ICC well after ICC came out you could still easily make progress with only raiding once a week, at least at first). With not enough guildies able to make it we would always have to pug one or two people, and seeing as how we couldn’t guarantee getting to the later bosses not many people who were at our gear level would join. We would end up only getting to somewhere in the plague wing before calling it quits. I do not bring this up to complain about the troubles of my old guild, but to bring up what I have seen happen to casual raiding guilds where members who wanted to raid couldn’t be a part of guilds runs that progressed. What happened was people left. Some left to join hardcore raiding guilds, same left to start hardcore raiding guilds, and the guild slowly started to die. What eventually sealed the deal was the guilds leaders having to quit wow on account of having to many activities to deal with their kids (it was a married couple that ran our guild). The guild is basically dead. I still log in a couple of times a week for a few minutes to see what is going on and on average there are only 3-5 people on (if that), when there used to be 20+ in the evenings. Only a handful of those who first wanted in on the guild raid runs are still in the guild and still log on.

I do not bring all this up to bitch, for that is not my intention. I mention this to show what I have seen happen to a casual raiding guild when those who want to raid can’t. They leave.

Now the Bomb Squads potential problem is that we currently have more than enough people who want to raid and can make the times. Currently we have been switching people in and out and it has been working fine, as people have mentioned. However there is one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread (although maybe I missed it) that is of concern. That thing being the reason we have been able to swap people out. For several weeks it seemed that our raids consisted of more or less the same people, without too much variation. This caused much of those people to get the gear they needed and now they are willing to swap out on bosses that they don’t need gear from in order to help the newer raiders gear up. The question is what do we do when we have more and more people getting into the 355-359 range and we are working on progression bosses? Having 15+ people all evenly geared who want to raid simply doesn’t work out. Several people are always going to be sitting on the bench. There is also future content to look out for. I know it is far away but what happens when 4.2 comes out and there is new raid content and everybody is more or less equal geared? Who gets to take part of the progression raids? With how raid sign ups work now, one 10 man group I don’t think will work. People will have to be sat out, and it might just come down to who can sign up the quickest. If we swap people out regularly this could potentially spread the loot out across enough people that progression slows down and people get frustrated. This is why I brought up my old guild. We have the opposite problem. We have more guildies that want to raid, than a 10 man works for. From my own experience in a guild that tries casual raiding, when people who want to raid and don’t get to, they leave. It might not be right away but I believe it will still eventually happen. We have seen it happen some already.

I know many of you have tossed around the idea of recruiting for a 25man. If we could get enough people for a 25man that would be great, but can this realistically happen? As a guild that says they are casual can we really get a group of 25 people together that can reliably raid 3 nights a week? In my opinion this starts to sound more like hardcore raiding.

I have also seen it mentioned that maybe we should recruit people who don’t want to raid. In my opinion we should be wary of this. Just because they don’t want to raid when they join doesn’t me they will always have that mindset. If non duders are going to change their mind when they hit 85 and leave because there aren’t enough raid spots, then what is the point of having them join the guild in the first place?

Like I said before I’m neither for nor against the idea of recruiting, but like many people have said before, there is always the potential of finding random assholes. I would also like to mention that it can take only one asshole to ruin a guild. While I have never seen it happen in a guild I was in, I have seen arguments in trade before that have seemed to destroy both a guilds membership and reputation because of one asshole arguing with a guilds officers/GM.

Anyway, there are my thoughts on the subject. I hope I didn’t get to off topic or make myself sound like a jerk/asshole which happens sometimes when I am need of sleep.

"I have also seen it mentioned that maybe we should recruit people who don’t want to raid. In my opinion we should be wary of this. Just because they don’t want to raid when they join doesn’t me they will always have that mindset. If non duders are going to change their mind when they hit 85 and leave because there aren’t enough raid spots, then what is the point of having them join the guild in the first place?"

The way I see it, we have a small, but strong community right now, with enough people to raid, and a decent amount of people on during the daylight hours. You're never going to see a huge increase in community numbers during the times of days when we don't have many people on. People get on and play during the weekends, especially casuals, and we already have a good number of people, whether it be for raiding or simply leveling, that are on during that time. We don't need to recruit for raids unless we really start to have problems with attendance, and while recruiting more casual, non-level capped players from outside Giant Bomb may add more people to our community, they share no common interest, and let's be honest, will not fit into our little community chock-full of in jokes and discussion about  very specific topics very well. And when someone feels like they don't fit into a guild, they leave it. 

I've been more than happy with the small guild environment. Obviously the most activity happens during the evening, but most of us have lives anyway. I understand Az's concern about the slippery slope of people leaving, though. As for my own activity, you probably won't see me until the end of next week when I'm finished with school for the year. I can't raid this weekend but I should be able to next weekend. The break's been good, though, because I was afraid I was close to burning out on the game.

I hope you guys don't mind me putting in my 2 cents here. What I really like about the Bomb Squad is the small niche community feel that comes from us all having a common interest. i.e. Giant Bomb and other Whiskey sites. As Troidy mentioned, we do a lot of inside jokes and discussions that only other Giant Bomb/Whiskey Media members will understand.  This could end up driving a rift between Giant Bomb members and those recruited from outside.  I don't think that forcing new members from outside to sign up for a Whiskey Media account just to access the guild forums is going to help in this regard.

I had thought about doing some of that stuff when the guild was more active. Maybe I should have thought about it harder ;)

" I had thought about doing some of that stuff when the guild was more active. Maybe I should have thought about it harder ;)

As far as being a promotional tool, it might work, but I don't know if it will keep people long term.

You know, Dave had once talked to me over PM about doing a live raid for TNT. It's been a few months, though, so I'm not sure if the idea was maybe shot down by the other staff. That could be an interesting promotional tool, especially to show people a side of this game they probably don't know anything about.

"

Can I still say fuck alot, cuz if so, let's do it.

@Thrawnkkar I still say no one will stay, we're too much of an in crowd, people wont get the jokes and the majority of the discussion that goes on in guild chat. They'll be almost instantly alienated. This is magnified if you only bring in small groups, they won't really have anyone else to talk to. However bringing in new people period is going to split the guild socially along the line of Giant Bomb Users vs. Non-Users. We would talk extensively in guild about things they have no fucking clue about, constantly, while they either try to talk about completely different things or just not get involved socially at all. This is the sort of thing that happens in most WoW guilds, where there is no common interest. The guild splits into cliques and they all talk amongst themselves in whispers and their own channel in vent.

Also someone should write the bombcast and ask pretty please to get a shout out. Server and that we are horde. Level and raid boss count. I want to hear brad say our name. :p

" @troidy: You're right about the standby stuff, but I also wonder if it would be beneficial to establish some sort of rotation system to guarantee anybody who wants to raid can at least one or two nights a week (even if it's the easy bosses, you can still get some VP and kick it on Mumble).

@Thrawnkkar: It wouldn't hurt, to be sure, but I feel like the "mass market" of Giant Bomb users came and went. Dave was talking about it on Twitter, and it has gotten a few off-hand mentions on the podcast. I figure most people are aware of it, so I'm not sure if we can get a second wave of new members in through staff promotion. Perhaps.

As for the TNT idea, if you guys think that would be fun, we can ask Dave to revisit it. Also we can upset people in the same way Andy did by creating a wiki page for the guild :)

"

lols.  It's ok, I'll  have a whole slew of people telling me what a horrible healer I am.  So we can revel in bitterness together.  QQ shitty healer!

Whatever guys, I think the top comment is going to be "Lol every time that cat dude goes up to the boss he stands in fire and dies"

Whatever guys, I think the top comment is going to be "Lol every time that cat dude goes up to the boss he stands in fire and dies"

" @bcjohnnie

Whatever guys, I think the top comment is going to be "Lol every time that cat dude goes up to the boss he stands in fire and dies"

More like: why is the cat guy standing in a corner before they pull the boss? "