Thursday, March 13, 2008

Brilliant Idea?

Okay this may be perceived as ludicrous to some, but....
In almost every guild, there comes a time where the regular raiders will start to have real life interference that takes them away from their raiding posts, or the player will simply drift into other things besides raiding... This will leave a void and can sometimes be compensated for by other guild members, but the more people who drift away, the more it can cripple a guild's raiding ability. At this point in time, the guild leaders will begin to consider recruiting replacements to fill those voids. Often they would like to get specific classes and will seek out replacements who are qualified for the position. Currently my guild is actively seeking to fill the position of a resto shaman and a shadow priest, as well as other general healing classes. As a response, the current guild members have searched through their friend lists and other resources finding a few players that are accepted.. but after those resources have been exhausted, the guild members must then look for new players that may not be well known entities.. HAT guild has the upper hand in recruiting because we currently have done a complete clear of Black Temple, and have Mount Hyjal on farm. Now.. here is where my idea comes in... Our little obstacle in recruiting is the fact that the majority of available players are not yet Black Temple attuned. The individuals who /are/ attuned are most likely content with their guild and would be very hard to recruit. The only ones who would be recruitable are more likely to be guild hoppers, or may end up being a bit sketchy with raid attendance. So, my idea includes a possible two week long process that would involve attuning some new characters. First of all, we would include several key alts that our current reliable players have for example: Jingle has a priest alt who was often at many of the pre-Black Temple raids and has decent gear. Several other players have well geared druid alts, or paladin alts as well. This would give the guild more flexibility for fights such as Gurtogg Bloodboil where a mage would not be nearly as useful as a priest would, and other fights where a melee or range DPS could be swapped out for an ALT healer or hybrid. Also, the player will be able to get excited about picking up gear that might otherwise be disenchanted because most of our main raiders are fairly well geared at this point. So, our attunement group would include about 4-5 Alts, but we still need more actual dedicated players to fill up the occasional extra spot in our 25 man raids. This is where the brilliance comes in. ..... Because we have basically run out of players whom people could *without a doubt* be vouched for, it would be a risk to _first_ invite a new recruit and _then_ attune them.. What if they don't show up to the raids? What if their performance isn't up to standards and brings the quality of our raids down? Then we would have to consider confronting them about their performance, replacing them, or even removing them from the guild.. Therefore.... I suggest that HAT advertise Black Temple Attunenments! There is a price of course. Probably set at somewhere between 500 to 1000 gold each. (According to other members of the Gorfiend server, attunment is already set at about 1000 gold). For our runs, we could charge: 300-600 for the Eye including Kael, and 200-400 hundred gold for SSC including Vashj. This would allow the dedicated players who are still loyal to their own guilds to become Black Temple attuned and possibly break away from their well loved guild that might not be progressing into the end game instances that they might wish to see, or stay with them and help them progress from the experience they gained from raiding with HAT. This would also allow some players in some guilds to manage to get their second vial and maybe also progress into end game. The price would compensate the high geared players who will be taking these folks through the instances. So for example, if the raid consists of 5 alt players, and 6 possible recruit tag-alongs. That would leave about 14-15 main players to be partially compensated for their efforts. Of course it would also be FUN for most serious raiders.. They raid because they enjoy it! So if SSC takes two days, with 6 recruits paying 200-400 gold each, that would be 1200-2400 gold to compensate the other members who are not alts. Each geared member would get about 80-160 gold to do this run for the alts and the possible recruits. Hopefully no one's repair bill will be over 40 gold each day, so it would be well worth the main raiders to first of all, get guild alts attuned, and secondly, evaluate some new players and possible recruits. In the end, even if this does not produce new members for the guild, the alts will be attuned, and the raiders will have had some fun at little to no cost to their personal gold funds. Some of the profits could also be given to the alts who are getting attuned in response to guild need anyways. (If the alts are included in the compensation equation, the guild members still will be compensated with 60-120 gold each for the SSC run, and 90-180 gold for The Eye run). As a result of including non guild members... these individuals can be seen as possible recruits. The possible recruits will get a chance in return to see how our guild runs, and evaluate whether or not they would fit in and enjoy raiding with us. It will be beneficial for all individuals involved in the long run. If all goes well, HAT will become even better known, and attain the reputation of containing players willing to help others. There are some risks though. A possible recruit could in fact attempt to ninja the instance when the scheduled rais is not running it. This would set our guild back a week with our attempts to attune people. If this does actually happen, our guild would simply delay the efforts and get back to our guild only Hijal farming runs and Black Temple runs. Therefore the possible recruits would need to be screened well as being well known non-malicious people. What are the chances that this will work? Well it will come down to the actual raid make up. If the 3 main tanks are top geared, and there are at least 3 top geared healers, and 4 top geared DPS, they should be able to pull the weight of the alts who should already be known to have excellent player skills and able to maximize their alt's efficiency. Hopefully the recruits will also be serious players that can be vouched for as reliable players and good people, so that the raid should still work out. It's so crazy it just might work...
Okay, so this isn't a NEW idea, but it is simply illustrated here in detail to point out how it might be beneficial to execute such a plan of action to help gather like minded people together who enjoy raiding...

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