Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Slacking and days off

I have been a bit slack on the updating front, but that is generally because things are going either swimmingly or we are stuck at Yogg. I don't really have anything to comment on, and nothing is triggering my thoughts to say "Hey, NER, you should blog about that".

This weeks Main progression night was called due to guild members *gasp* having a life and most were still recovering from various long weekend activities that generally involved an increased intake of stimulants and a lack of sleep. Monday night they were all still somewhat maggoted, so I decided instead of putting together a makeshift team and hit Yogg, to tell everyone to have a night off.

That said, we killed yogg anyway 10man style for the first time.

So I will write up a 10man Yogg guide - which will be rather brief, because we kinda killed him fast, and I didnt really get to see many tricks, because this 10man team was really slick.

But having a night off is not a bad thing, in fact it can revitalise a guild to do better the next week. Also, Mondays are our main progression night, and are often a public holiday (as this monday was) so often we have "long weekends off" raiding. This means that a wipe night is avoided, which is a good idea if you are spending a lot of Mondays wiping on this or that new boss.

Which kind of brings me to Raid Burnout. We are a 3 raid a week guild. All the guild further in progression than us on our server are 4 day a week guilds. Yet, we are keeping pace (pretty easily) with them. We are up to Yogg. So are they. A bunch of them have downed Yogg, but a bunch have been on him for a couple of weeks longer than us. How can you run progression content 4 nights a week and not have people emo at you about it?

Personally, I dont think you really can unless you are a HardCore guild and extremely motivated by progression (which is a VERY small percentage of us). We have pretty good attendance records, even though we dont have mandatory attendance requirements. However, if you dont show up, we recruit your spot, but we also have standbys, so people rotate and have nights off. But we have a ridiculously low turnover rate. People dont guild jump to and from our guild very often. People retire, but that is a different thing - and they stay in the guild. No hard feelings. Raiding isn't the be all and end all of WoW.

People like having some time off. But if you dont want time off, you dont have to. The option is there and you are not really penalised for it. I think this keeps many people playing longer than they normally would do.

I think of it this way. I prefer a decent player to be available 1-2 nights a week for months than a great player who is 100% available but burns out in 1-2 months, or decides we are not awesome enough for him or whatever. That might make us a bit slower in progression, but our progression is solid and repeatable and the guild is stable.

Man that was a ramble. I need a coffee. Stupid no coffee... Yogg strat coming