Guildleader chores - When one door closes, another opens
Holidays soon! I will be away for 2 weeks so I am a bit sad to be missing out on raids. However, tonight was a tough decision.
We did say that if we were struggling for numbers on one night then we were going to call it quits for mythics. Tonight, we did struggle.
I knew that it was going to be tough and I spent a lot of the afternoon looking for PuGs. I went through group finder, recruitment forums, I visited different servers checking for responses from people I had sent personal mails to. I posted on Facebook to try to drum up interest, and I even sent out a message on Twitter (which was kindly retweeted by Neuro) and I found one person there. But, we were missing a number of people - Dan, Bish and Splatz - and one of the pugs didn't show. Even with the extra friend of Neuro's (a Twitter follower!), we didn't have enough and Xyn said to me in officer "Do you remember what we said if we couldn't make the numbers?" I did remember. How could I forget? I didn't want to stop raiding mythic, even though it was a lost cause, but it was inevitable. And at least I did my best!
So we did a heroic Archi instead, and at the end of the raid let everyone know. There was some relief, actually. Some people were happy for the break. Some were disappointed. However, I did know that perhaps this was an opportunity for our guild to take a different approach and be the fillers for a raid this time.
Aza was doing mythic HFC with his own friends, and though I was glad he was getting to do stuff with his friends outside of guild, it was slightly bittersweet to see him getting mythic boss kills whilst we were unable to do our own raid. He had stopped raiding because he wasn't enjoying playing with people who were PuGs and carrying them whilst we didn't progress, so at least he is enjoying himself now.
Nostalgic has started Mythic raiding, and now that we have stopped raiding, we have a small pool of raiders that can join with them. They raid on totally opposite days to us, so it doesn't interfere with what we want to do. Now we can just concentrate on heroic alt stuff and if they need us, we can be pugged into their raids. Tauroki has been kind and let many of my guildies come to their raids, and he enjoys our company, and they are similar enough to us that we can get along without friction.
So the pressure is off - I no longer have to find people to raid. I can now be one of the PuGs and relax and just heal and be told what to do! I will still get to play with those in my guild who are interested in pugging with us (and there are a few) and we will get to do mythics once a week and heroics the other day. I am relieved, yet disappointed. It's strange that I can feel both! But I will look at the bright side of it (rather than think of myself as the failure) and throw myself into helping, and enjoy life as a raider on the other side of the stick :)
We did say that if we were struggling for numbers on one night then we were going to call it quits for mythics. Tonight, we did struggle.
I knew that it was going to be tough and I spent a lot of the afternoon looking for PuGs. I went through group finder, recruitment forums, I visited different servers checking for responses from people I had sent personal mails to. I posted on Facebook to try to drum up interest, and I even sent out a message on Twitter (which was kindly retweeted by Neuro) and I found one person there. But, we were missing a number of people - Dan, Bish and Splatz - and one of the pugs didn't show. Even with the extra friend of Neuro's (a Twitter follower!), we didn't have enough and Xyn said to me in officer "Do you remember what we said if we couldn't make the numbers?" I did remember. How could I forget? I didn't want to stop raiding mythic, even though it was a lost cause, but it was inevitable. And at least I did my best!
So we did a heroic Archi instead, and at the end of the raid let everyone know. There was some relief, actually. Some people were happy for the break. Some were disappointed. However, I did know that perhaps this was an opportunity for our guild to take a different approach and be the fillers for a raid this time.
Aza was doing mythic HFC with his own friends, and though I was glad he was getting to do stuff with his friends outside of guild, it was slightly bittersweet to see him getting mythic boss kills whilst we were unable to do our own raid. He had stopped raiding because he wasn't enjoying playing with people who were PuGs and carrying them whilst we didn't progress, so at least he is enjoying himself now.
Nostalgic has started Mythic raiding, and now that we have stopped raiding, we have a small pool of raiders that can join with them. They raid on totally opposite days to us, so it doesn't interfere with what we want to do. Now we can just concentrate on heroic alt stuff and if they need us, we can be pugged into their raids. Tauroki has been kind and let many of my guildies come to their raids, and he enjoys our company, and they are similar enough to us that we can get along without friction.
So the pressure is off - I no longer have to find people to raid. I can now be one of the PuGs and relax and just heal and be told what to do! I will still get to play with those in my guild who are interested in pugging with us (and there are a few) and we will get to do mythics once a week and heroics the other day. I am relieved, yet disappointed. It's strange that I can feel both! But I will look at the bright side of it (rather than think of myself as the failure) and throw myself into helping, and enjoy life as a raider on the other side of the stick :)
It is nice having the pressure off - it's even nicer when you can turn up to a raid and just do YOUR job and not also have to try and concentrate on what everyone else is doing, and why things aren't working, and how to get enough for the raid, and who should do which jobs on bosses, if you have enough ranged, enough interrupters, enough who actually know what they're doing ...
ReplyDeleteBut then, when you're having problems regularly getting people together to make a raid group, you kinda feel like it's YOUR fault - you've not tried hard enough, you've "promised" a raid, but you're struggling to provide it and you're worried people will feel let down.
I think you just have to take a breath, a step back, discuss it with your raiders and just tell them how it is - although they probably already knew anyway.
We *are* getting to the point where it's more and more difficult to keep people interested - we still have new people coming into the guild who want to raid, who have very little experience of raiding, so I'd like to be able to provide them some of that experience, in the hope they'll enjoy it, and stick with us for Legion - but at the same time our regular members are losing interest in doing those lower raid bosses so it's a struggle to get numbers. At some point in the near future I'll probably just stop doing those completely - but for now we're struggling on - at least for another few weeks.
I think I might enjoy it, but I'm one whose fingers itch when I'm not doing something organisational... hope you guys are still going strong - but at least there's a release date now!
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