Summertime and the livin is easy
Fish are jumpin and the cotton is fine
Oh your daddys rich and your ma is good lookin
So hush little baby, don’t you cry-Gershwin
So the weather outside is becoming nice once again for many of us. With the nice weather comes what I like to refer to as the “Raider’s Lull” . What is the Raider’s Lull you ask? It’s that time of year where people start to take a break from the game and venture forth into the outside world for a while. For some guilds in Warcraft it’s not a big deal, they simply replenish from within and keep trudging through content while waiting for the other players return. For others it becomes an exercise in recruitment methods. I’m sure you’ve seen them on the realm forums, various websites and services like Twitter all asking for recruits and potential applicants to head over to their site. For some guilds it’s the beginning of their death throes.
The first category, the guilds that don’t feel the bite, tend to be the more progression oriented. They normally have several raiders waiting in the wings or rotating just for the reason of filling gaps due to holidays and such. These more often then not are also the top guilds on your server in those terms as well, normally one of those “server first” type guilds. If you find yourself in one of these guilds, then you probably haven’t seen the Raider’s Lull
The second category is more common, and I freely admit my own guild recently falls into this category this year. These tend to be not less progression oriented guilds, but ones that are more laid back in their approach to getting there. Attendance issues pop up in the summer when weather is nice and kids are out of school. It’s understandable and more often then not the guild just has to bide it’s time until the raiders return, utilizing other members of the guild who maybe don’t normally raid.
The third group is a bit trickier. Usually this is a guild that has had ongoing attendance issues year round, or has been subject to some form of drama. Sometimes more progression oriented guildies have just left for another guild or even their members are looking for a guild that fits their ideals better. The summer time seems to bring these to a head and they wind up splintering and finding new homes, some players even quit the game as a result.
Breaking the Depression!
So how does one from the second and third category keep going into the summer time?
Recruitment!
Oddly enough recruitment can solve both the second and third groups problems. I’ll use my guild as an example again. Summer time hit and we saw the loss of a handful of raiders, the problem was these were people integral to our raid and raid strategy on some accounts. We have veterans we can pull for raids when they are on, but since they are veterans and not raiders their schedules tend to be a bit more erratic and pinning them down can be difficult, but pulling from our friends and family in the guild we have been able to keep raiding fairly consistently with good results. They may not be hard mode ready, but they can still kick like a mule when they need to.
The raiders we lost were well geared and performed well. It left us with several holes to fill. Our officers proactively hit recruitment hard utilizing various methods. As a result we have had an influx of very solid recruits. The recruits are from a guild of the third option above. Their guild was not a comfortable fit for them anymore, and they happened to see a post of mine saying we were looking for geared intelligent raiders. I talked to one of them for almost a month answering questions as best I could. They were from another server so a certain leap of faith was required though this app process as my guild requires our apps be on server for the trial periods and such. After much communication, enter four applicants. They are currently going through our application process, but they have already been making friends and feel like a good fit. Recruitment has kept us going strong and has helped us keep raiding, and it helped four very awesome people find a potential new home with new friends. So thank you Kaylestera, Trull, Andorel and Lysah for taking a leap of faith and putting in those apps.
For recruiting there are several different ways to go about it. For my guild we utilized internet services such as
We also utilized Word of Mouth along the server, with friends from other guilds letting people know we were recruiting. Members of our guild spread word among their real life friends as well as their friends on server letting them know we were hiring so to speak. So far it’s been working out very well. Unpossible is still going strong and we’ll survive our Raider’s Lull.
So, is your guild facing the Raider’s Lull? If so, how are you compensating for it? What category does your guild fall into?
Until next time, Happy Healing.
Images courtesy of akmg.com and electrotestservies.co.uk
Being a teacher, I would expect have the summer freer than the rest of the year for WoW playing and raiding, unfortunately, the summer doldrums affect me as much as anyone else.
It’s not the weather itself, but the freedom that keeps me from raiding. I have time off, and I hate to consider it wasted because I am spending it on WoW. I look at it like this: is having a break from work really a break if I am having to schedule and put in 15+ hours a week raiding? Would that not be equally as limiting as working over the summer?
To me it is. So my solution has been to take it easy, play casually, and PvP instead of raid. I hate that I’ve not seen the inside of Ulduar yet, but I’m at least enjoying most of my time spend in-game instead of stressing over the scheduling and progression drama.
To each his own, though. Summertime raiding back at 60 was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in game. We cleared BWL finally and moved into AQ40 over a summer, and it was a blast. We had attendance problems, like you mention, and part of the exhilaration came from clearing “progression” content with fewer than a full raid. Maybe this is the time when guilds start to work on those achievements that reward fewer players in a raid? 🙂
.-= Beej´s last blog ..LOST Therory: Quarantine? =-.
We have a smidge – but being a progression guild with many server firsts in Ulduar, we have a good supply of applicants. Being on a small RP server though, we don’t have a huge talent pool to draw from.
Same deal on our server as Adgamorix. I would love to raid one week and be off one week but a small pop and the summer woes makes me look like I’m dropping the ball for my guild if I try to enjoy life. 🙁
Even guilds that don’t have raiding as a goal can experience this. The only difference is that many goals can be accomplished anyway, through pugging, that a raid-oriented guild would still have troubles with.
Still, it can be sort of depressing as someone who is less able to go out and enjoy the summer to have many less friends around to play with.
I was away last week visiting family and it seemed like the wheels flew off, come back and 4 good raiders had left cause we couldn’t get groups together all of last week for some reason.
Summertime Woes…that was a pun, right? 😉
@Dian, why yes, yes it was.
I am still up when I get back Lodur I hope ^-^
My friend is keeping me up slightly while I am on deployment but when I get back i hope I cna go through your app process as well ^-^