I was listening to a fellow WoW podcast, and I heard an interesting working of words most of us in WoW use a fair bit. The person was stating that theirs is a Guild that raids, not a raiding guild. I found this a very interesting perspective to apply to the big questions of end game. My guild, the Shadow Walkers, is much like this, but we do much, much more than raid. We RP, PvP, and just play together in the game. We are at minimum a guild that raids.
I guess the best thing to do in this conversation would be to define the two forms of the guilds that have a raid component. The first, and far more popular term is Raiding Guild. the way I see a raiding guild is a guild with a mandatory raiding requirement. An example of this could be 'you must raid 4 nights a week. Another could be 'You must raid at least 1 raid a week'. You will note I have put both of these, minimal requirements and mid to hardcore requirements, in the same category. I feel strongly that if your guild had a raid requirement, it is not a guild that raids, but a Raiding Guild.
Another characteristic found commonly in Raiding Guild is that they define themselves by a series of letters and numbers. 'SSC 4/6, TK 3/4, BT 3/9'. While a PvP guild might rank themselves by a different set of numbers, such as '4 x 5v5 2100+', the numbers that the Raiding Guild use are more widely acknowledged as the marker for end game content. My guild? 0/6, 0/4, 0/9. I will not say I am happy that we haven't progressed to that, but I am happy we haven't pushed ourselves into the realm of a Raiding Guild where those numbers make or break us.
while I will not attribute this to *every* Raiding guild, the lack of recruiting morals definitely seems to pervade the raiding structure on my realm. Raiding Guilds do not hesitate to poach, bribe, trick and even swindle players into joining them, even if the player will likely not see beyond farm content for weeks. My guild, with myself as the recruitment lead, has very strict rules on how and under what circumstances we will accept a player. for instance, a player needs to be leaving their guild for decent reasons, and be gone from it for at least 24 hours before we will accept them.
Now to the guild that raids. The guild that raids schedules raids for a few nights a week, and encourages sign up. They will do their best to help those who want to raid with gear, be it in gear selection, questing, or in dungeon crawls for gearing up. unlike a raiding guild, who will often demand their players spend hours on a boss until it is mastered, the guild that raids will devour a place like Karazhan where, once you pass Curator, you can go one of 3 or 4 directions. Wipe a couple times on Shade? Try your hand at Illhoof, or Nightbane, or Chess. Chess is always a good, easy round of loot.
Now that I have defined for you how I see these two different combination's of guilds and raids, I am curious of a few things. First, do you agree? Do you have stuff to add or detract from my points? Where would your guild fall in these categories, or would they be something completely different? Do you aspire to those letters and numbers? Different ones? Would you accept the invitation of a raid guild to leave your guild to join their raid team? Let me know what you think!
I guess the best thing to do in this conversation would be to define the two forms of the guilds that have a raid component. The first, and far more popular term is Raiding Guild. the way I see a raiding guild is a guild with a mandatory raiding requirement. An example of this could be 'you must raid 4 nights a week. Another could be 'You must raid at least 1 raid a week'. You will note I have put both of these, minimal requirements and mid to hardcore requirements, in the same category. I feel strongly that if your guild had a raid requirement, it is not a guild that raids, but a Raiding Guild.
Another characteristic found commonly in Raiding Guild is that they define themselves by a series of letters and numbers. 'SSC 4/6, TK 3/4, BT 3/9'. While a PvP guild might rank themselves by a different set of numbers, such as '4 x 5v5 2100+', the numbers that the Raiding Guild use are more widely acknowledged as the marker for end game content. My guild? 0/6, 0/4, 0/9. I will not say I am happy that we haven't progressed to that, but I am happy we haven't pushed ourselves into the realm of a Raiding Guild where those numbers make or break us.
while I will not attribute this to *every* Raiding guild, the lack of recruiting morals definitely seems to pervade the raiding structure on my realm. Raiding Guilds do not hesitate to poach, bribe, trick and even swindle players into joining them, even if the player will likely not see beyond farm content for weeks. My guild, with myself as the recruitment lead, has very strict rules on how and under what circumstances we will accept a player. for instance, a player needs to be leaving their guild for decent reasons, and be gone from it for at least 24 hours before we will accept them.
Now to the guild that raids. The guild that raids schedules raids for a few nights a week, and encourages sign up. They will do their best to help those who want to raid with gear, be it in gear selection, questing, or in dungeon crawls for gearing up. unlike a raiding guild, who will often demand their players spend hours on a boss until it is mastered, the guild that raids will devour a place like Karazhan where, once you pass Curator, you can go one of 3 or 4 directions. Wipe a couple times on Shade? Try your hand at Illhoof, or Nightbane, or Chess. Chess is always a good, easy round of loot.
Now that I have defined for you how I see these two different combination's of guilds and raids, I am curious of a few things. First, do you agree? Do you have stuff to add or detract from my points? Where would your guild fall in these categories, or would they be something completely different? Do you aspire to those letters and numbers? Different ones? Would you accept the invitation of a raid guild to leave your guild to join their raid team? Let me know what you think!
Well, that certainly clarifies things for me.
I will never be in a "Raiding Guild", as I do not play often enough to meet their requirements. This, however, does not trouble me, because I play WoW just for fun. That is my entire goal, to have fun. I do not see it being fun for me to feel like I "had" to raid a certain number of times a week, or "had" to raid, at all, if I did not feel like it. It's WoW, after all, not a job!
On the other hand, being part of a "Guild that raids" sounds much better. Some days, I'm just going to want to goof around and role play. Other days, I would much rather just find a bunch of monsters to kill. It doesn't sound like a "Raiding Guild" is going to be very approving of me making those choices.