Scenario 1
You sign up for ICC. At go-time, the raid leader announces that there aren’t enough people signed up to do ICC, but if we pull in some casual players, we can do a lower-level instance like Ulduar. Let’s say you HATE Ulduar and are tired of Ulduar and just don’t wanna. You signed up for ICC. It doesn’t matter about gear (let’s say you don’t need gear from either instance) it matters that you signed up for X, and now you are about to do Y.
So what do you do? Do you go along with it because if you don’t, you spoil it for the other 9 people who are fine with doing Ulduar? Do you say “thanks but no thanks” and wander off?
Scenario 2
You sign up for ICC to continue to work on Sindragosa. At go-time, the raid leader announces that there aren’t enough people signed up, but if we pull in casual players, we can make a full raid. However, you’re not going to try Sindragosa, as originally planned, but instead head to Festergut. Same instance, change of plans in which boss you are going to do.
Has your answer changed? Should it?
The Balancing Act
Essentially you are having to balance the needs of the guild against the needs of yourself. You don’t want to be a dick to other people, but you don’t want to spend your playtime being dragged to stuff that you didn’t want to do (especially if you have limited playtime).
Food for Thought
When you sign up for a raid, do you sign up for the activity itself, and if the activity changes, your sign up is void? Or do you sign up for a time slot, and the guild has you for that time slot, regardless of what you end up doing during that time?
If you sign up for an activity, how much of a change in plans is so much of a change that you are no longer expected to attend under the original sign up?
Does it matter whether some people still need something from the new activity? Does it matter what they need (i.e. a mount versus an achievement?)
If changes of plans were common, would you think twice before signing up for activities?
EDIT: Further reading!
Pocket Heals: “We’ve Not Enough People…We’re Going to ToC” “Wait…What? I Didn’t Sign up for That…”
Muradin Musings: Self-Interest vs. Greater Good
To be honest, I’ve mostly been signing up for my limited raids as a time slot. from 9-12, I am my guild’s bitch and will do my best to heal through anything they throw me at.
On the other hand, something that’s not CURRENT content, like an Ulduar run, would be the event. If I sign up for an Ulduar run, it’s because I DESPERATELY WANT TO RUN ULDUAR, not Naxxramas or ToGC. If we switched to Naxx for some reason, I’d probably go, having never seen it, but ToGC? Screw that, find a different healer, I signed up for Ulduar. >_>
Or, really, I guess it’s more… for me, our official raid nights belong to the guild, and I’m signing up for a time slot. Everything outside of that, though, I’d be signing up for the event itself, and would take changes to the plan on a case-by-case basis, depending on what everyone wanted to achieve and what I know I don’t enjoy (ToC/ToGC).
That’s kind of how I feel about Ulduar (hate), especially Mimiron. But I don’t want to be a bad sport or a jerk and have a fun time cancelled for 9 other people just because Mimiron makes me want to stab people.
WHAT!
How *dare* you be mean to that lovely button
*sobs*
As a raid leader again, I try to stick to the same tier of content if we can’t do X, Y or Z that was planned. So if we hadn’t been able to get through Gunship, bugged as it was, the other night, I would have taken us over to Ruby Sanctum. It never crossed my mind to even consider TOC/TOGC or Ulduar.
As a raider, that’s what I want — the same tier. The most challenging tier. If I signed up for a raid, I wanted to know that we’d be raiding ICC or RS or, back in the day, TOGC, not Ulduar.
One night, one of my raid leaders told us all to head to Mount Hyjal. No kidding. He had us go to Hyjal and do Archimonde with 3 pieces of gear missing and we weren’t allowed to use things like bubble, iceblock, etc.
Why? Because he felt our issues on Yogg-Saron were similar to problems people had with Doomfire and the like on Archimonde.
I nearly dropped group and logged off, but I was an officer. I persevered and told my healers that, by golly, we were going to Mount Hyjal and that I would take their feedback back to the raid leader.
In private, I blasted the raid leader for not having the courtesy to tell us, his fellow officers, about it and that ALL of my healers felt it was an exercise in futility, that you don’t go back to a previous expansion’s raid to master mechanics in a current raid.
So I like to make sure that people know roughly where we’re going, if not what fights we’re doing. I like to make sure people are prepared for various possibilities, but I don’t like people cherry-picking their nights to show up. As such, this week we did Blood Wing first instead of Plagueworks and went 8/12 on the first night and now just have Putricide, Frostwing Halls and LK up.
Anyways. I think raiders should have a vague idea of what tier they’re doing and I feel that we shouldn’t do the raid if we can’t do that tier. IMHO.
That is rank foolishness on the part of that RL. Yogg and Archimonde are entirely different encounters. They’re not even the same archetype. Running into Archimonde’s enrage was almost impossible, but wiping to even a single minor mistake from one person was easy. Guilds with Illidan on farm for a month could still wipe on Archimonde. Yogg is all about KILL EVERYTHING FAST RIGHT NOW. The crushers have to die ASAP so that you can kill all the corrupters and oh my god kill the illusions and get the brain down NOW NOW NOW. Standing in slightly the wrong place for a fraction of a second will never wipe you on Yogg, but insufficient DPS was probably the biggest hurdle for most guilds working on him.
Such a fundamental lack of understanding of boss mechanics does not bode well for that raid leader, in my opinion.
I would have been hating life. What is so wrong about a practice run like that is that people are completely unprepared if it’s last minute. They can’t be expected to absorb a complex strat on content, regardless of whether the content is lvl 80 or lvl 60, if it’s last minute. And it’s just downright embarrassing to wipe on lower content. If you stand in the insta-kill bad, you will die regardless of gear.
For me, this depends heavily on the guild I’m involved in, where we are in current progression vs. overall progression goals, and whether or not I feel like it.
As long as you are working on current progression (tier) bosses, it’s irrelevant whether you’re beating on boss a or boss b even if boss b is progression, since their is a potential for overall gain for the guild.
However, once you change the venue from current progression (tier) to closed progression (fun or achievement type runs) on the spur of the moment, then I do have a choice in whether I pursue the content or not.
Honestly, backtracking to a previous (or 2 or 3) tier dungeon for achievement running when I may in a position to need upgrades that I can purchase (cash or token) on my own, seems a waste of my time since I can be more effectively “progressing” solo (i.e. earning money/mats for gear upgrades and the like).
However, if the guild has a policy of X days are for whatever the raid decides and Y days are for progression, then I am firmly timing up for the time slot regardless of what is ultimately decided. So, if the guild doesn’t have set progression/non-progression days OR is ALWAYS in a position of “we’ll see what we do when we form the raid” then I am definitely obligated for the time slot regardless of what activity is planned.
Do you think it makes a difference what role you’re playing? I know that if I back out of a last-minute-swap, it will be near-impossible to get a healer sub, whereas a DPS sub is probably possible. Healer guilt?
Actually, for the talk, I considered myself a tank/healer since those are the most prominent roles I’ve played in the last few years.
I think this is why it depends heavily on your guild. If this is a common occurrence, then you should be used to it and suck it up.
However, if this is a weird occurrence, i.e. not enough sign-ups, sign-ups didn’t show, then it is important to remember that the problem was created by other people, and your yes or no doesn’t change that. You’re having to pug members either way, so filling your slot shouldn’t be the end of the world as we know it.
Most guilds I have been with that have the random not enough people have just sucked up the lack of the raid slot and done the progression anyway in order to train people, knowing that we’re all going to die horribly from a lack of sustainable dps or another issue.
The other option, of course, is for the leadership proactively cancel the raid, which takes away from the raiders having to waffle.
Hello! I’ve been browsing blogs from one to the other, clicked on this one because “Murloc Parliament” is a cute name, and wanted to mention that I like this post. It’s something I’ve certainly encountered before, but also something I’ve never thought about explicitly.
So! I think that ideally you’d have this figured out ahead of time, in terms of you should know how your guild handles things like this. I’m currently raid leading for a tens-only guild, and we’ve occasionally had to make choices like “do we attempt to pug someone in,” and “should we do plague or blood first or figure out something else” or whatever. How I always deal with this is, well, I give the raid my suggestion in vent/raidchat and see what people think.
As a concrete example, last night before raid start I said to the raid “I think it would be great if we got one more LK kill in this week to get a couple more people their KS titles. Then, starting next week, I think it would be awesome if we went back and tried for Glory of the Ulduar Raider. What does everyone think?”
Clearly it’s not an exact parallel, but my response to “the plans are changing tonight” has always been very similar, and that’s how our raid worked. If you’re in a guild where all discussion happens outside of raid time, and during raid time you Do As The RL Says, then you should be aware of that and when you sign up for a raid, you’re signed up for it. If your RL routinely does things with your time that you disagree with, you gquit.
So yes, to be more precise: it depends on your relationship with your guild. And if you disagree with the way your guild does things, you should find a different guild.
I’m already subbed to your blog cause I’m sneaky like that
Let’s say 8 of 10 people say “yah let’s do Ulduar, that’s cool” and 2 are like “oh hells no, it’s awful.” Then what?
Are you really? Goodness! Well thank you! I really need to get an RSS reader – those make it much easier to be subscribed to a bazillion blogs, which I find I actually want to do: then you’ve always got something to read.
But to answer your thing! The two people get overruled that night, and if they come to talk to me I say “this is how things are going to work here. So I understand your frustration, but this is the method that works for this guild.” If they reflect and find that they’re better off looking for a guild that’s a better fit for them, then I think that totally makes sense. If, on the other hand, they feel that the benefits of our mostly informal style outweigh the cons, then they’ll come for that night.
Finally, we do track attendance. So when we get to those big exciting progression nights, then the people with great performance and high attendance are going to get raid slot preference over the people with great performance and hit or miss attendance. I don’t think anything bad about someone for bailing when plans change: it’s a hobby we keep because it’s fun. When it ceases to be fun, what’s the point right? Which is why it’s the shared responsibility of both guilds and their members to make sure everyone fits together well.
Personally, I would sign up and go with either of the options, heck, I’d stick around even if all we were gonna do is go try BT or AQ or something. I want to do older content just to have done it and its something different from the same old. It wouldn’t bother me to go do Rotface instead if we were planning on going into ICC anyway; I’d still want to go.
What about the reverse? If the sign up says Weekly/VoA (I never sign up for this because I hate VoA with a passion). ICC saved at 11/12 is scheduled for a different day and I have signed up for that day. I do something else on Weekly/VoA day because everybody needs a night off from raiding, but I am available. I come back the next day to find they decided not to do the Weekly or VoA, but instead continued on our current ICC lockout and downed the LK for the first time by pugging others in, and now I’m locked to an ICC for the rest of the week with no opportunity to down the LK (this was before the patch that changed raid lockouts). I was a pretty upset about this as I had thought we would be killing the LK for the first time as a guild with the group we had been doing ICC with.
I think this is one of the major conundrums of being in or leading a raiding guild. It is nearly impossible to get other people who are on the exact same page as everyone else in regards to these kinds of specific situations. There are a million pitfalls with a raiding team, and the fault can lie with the individual team members, but fault can also lie with leadership as well. The key is clear communication.
Being in a guild is a give and take and very much a team sport. There has to be a happy medium where you can trust your guild to do what they say they are going to do, and the guild can trust you to be there for content even if it may not be what you wanted to do. Unfortunately, that sweet spot is darn near impossible to find.
Yeah… it equally sucks when people do the “assigned raid” earlier than on the appointed night and then on the appointed night there’s nothing left to do.
I wrote up a whole post for a reply! http://pocketheals.blogspot.com/2010/11/weve-not-enough-peoplewere-going-to-toc.html
Overall, I think setting aside certain days for “fun” days or “offnights” is the best way to do old content/previous tiers.
If you know your raiding teams very well, then you can decide if going to ToC or Ulduar is something they want to do. If everyone enjoys it, then yay! If you’re doing it just to avoid working on the “hard” bosses, then perhaps a reevaluation of the goals of the team is in order. Is working on the top tier your cup of tea? Would you rather do the older content? Anything is OK, as long as everyone who participates is happy with it.
I agree with Ama, “The key is clear communication.” What are the goals for your team?
That’s awesome that I could get you thinking enough for your own reply. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but there are no clear answers. I’ve seen people bitch and moan because we weren’t doing FREYA before THORIM because “I need X from Freya” and thought it was dickish behavior. But maybe that person only has one night a week to play and was really gunning for Freya.
I find that I frequently have the opposite frustration – the raid leaders / schedule-y people are reluctant to post nightly goals until they see what comps & sign-ups look like. This has led to me just not signing up on some nights because I know it’s a craps shoot – maybe it’ll be something I really enjoy, and maybe it’ll be something that I’d rather claw my eyes out than do.
It’s not easy either way. No matter which way leadership goes, someone is bound to be unhappy when a tough choice needs to be made.
That said, my personal policy is if I’ve signed up for a raid night, I will defer to whatever the raid leader chooses, or the majority votes for. That doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t volunteer to sit if it’s something I’d rather not do, and someone else is excited about it, but I won’t be the person who drops out because I’m not getting what I expected and putting the rest of the group in an awkward – at best – situation. Now, I feel that way as someone who primarily plays a DPS class.
I am far more likely to be persnickety, though, if not only are we doing content I don’t want to do or am not interested in, AND I’m expected to use my offspec to get the job done.
For me, I’d rather have a raid cancelled hours in advance if signups are looking crappy than to wait around and try to scrape together something at the last minute. But that’s me.
I know of some guys whose wives give them “2 wow nights a week” or some such. The dude clears his schedule for Wednesday only to discover the raid is called off due to lack of sign ups. He’s already used one of his “wow creds” for the week on that night, and now has no Wow to do. That would be one reason that a raid leader would try to make an alternate event for a night when the scheduled raid is no-go due to sign-ups.
If the raid is cancelled early, ATT & I just wander off and watch Netflix or some such nonsense. There’s no overwhelming desire to be online and “find another group activity to do” if the scheduled raid can’t happen as planned.
Our Alliance GM is in a similar situation to the guys you describe – she and her fiance have an agreement that Wed/Thurs are the only nights she can raid. So if we have short signups, and a raid gets canceled, she misses out on raiding for the week – which is why I think that we scramble so hard sometimes.
My other half would raid 7 days a week, if he thought he could get away with it. If a regularly scheduled raid night is canceled, and he wants to PuG? Fine by me. I am totally able to entertain myself. I *don’t* PuG.
You have totally described my current situation, except my wow creds come on nights when my wife is working. I have no control over that, so if it is a night that we are raiding, great. If not, time to grind rep, run dungeons, or do some other type of activity.
I generally regard the time I sign up for as “guild time” rather than “time to do X”, so I’m not fussed much if plans change. Then again as an officer I also regard it as part of my responsibility to help make stuff happen.
That said, the exception is when decisions are made last-minute to do stuff that really requires some preparation or research before it happens. I do NOT like spending my off nights coughing up hefty repair bills because some bright spark thought we should do hard modes after we went to Uld for fun.
Sometimes the old stuff is harder to do than the current stuff because we’re all scratching our heads like “guys, how do you do this again?” “Uh, there’s like lightning and stuff.” “Do we collapse or spread out?” “Hey when’s the tank swap?”
I run a progression guild and I’m afraid the expectations for my core group and the more casual raiders is different.
Casual raiders are largely welcome to do what they please with raiding as long as they aren’t bailing once it has started.
If the plans change I expect my core raiders to go along with it to help the group as a whole if there is a reason for the content – such as Ulduar mounts or TOGC achievements (aiming for the mount!). If someone just wants to go to Naxx to farm Justice Points anyone who does not want to go is excused with no trouble. If anyone bails on content they dislike on a regular basis when the rest of the team needs/desires something location related then they won’t be a part of the core team for long. As much as it’s about the content it is also about the team and playing together. Even in older content it’s important to me that we treat it like a “real” raid!
I tend to care if we “need” stuff or not, and do we actually “need” it or just “want” it.
If we are trying to gear up a new recruit because we have a gaping hole in the heal team, I will cheerfully do the first wing of ICC again. If it’s for Alt #4 of Indecisiveboy, I would rather be washing my hair.
In my guild you sign up to raid. Where said raid goes is 100 percent at the discretion of the Officers. Changes are often made at short notice depending on composition etc and people are expected to get on with it really. Although I must admit my heart sinks when certain bosses are mentioned.
We started out in vanilla by posting which nights were going to which dungeon but then people started cherry picking the fights they wanted to show up for, i.e. every single person on the roster would turn up for the farm nights in Molten Core but didn’t always want to wipe on stuff in BWL. So we adapted. Now the guild goals are to clear X amount of content each week and we expect everyone to be on the same page in that regard. It shouldn’t matter to them which day we kill which boss.
Exactly. I think it’s a dick move when people want to reap the rewards of being on the team on nights when loot is being handed out but want to let the others do the heavy lifting learning a new fight on wipe night. But is that wrong of me to judge when I’d rather be washing my hair than ever seeing Mimiron again, considering there is NO tangible benefit to downing him?
On a side note, some loot systems reward participation in wipe nights so that it takes the sting out of beating your head against the wall. The guy who avoids the wipe nights like the plague will lose loot rolls to the guy who has been dutifully doing corpse runs.
Our loot council takes participation in wipe stuff into account yes. However it’s more about making sure we always have the numbers for wipe nights rather than anything else. For example all the loot in the world wouldn’t necessarily make me show up for a night of killing Malegcos, Firefighter and Algalon and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
I’m the GM of a new guild. This is my first guild EVER, put together orginally so that I could have 6 more bank tabs to store all my stuff! (No other members) LOL, packrat ingame….neat freak out. Ah well. So then a few of my RL friends came in, and then someone here, and someone there. Before I knew it I had a 10man raiding guild. We are weekend raiders, as many who visit this site. I have 4 kids and a wonderful girlfriend (who is also my best friend) so my time ingame is my time and I sure hate wasting those minutes.
We’ve done some raids for fun for a few weeks. A very casual guild with RL being fast pace and WoW offten taking a backseat, and then last weekend I posted ICC on the calander. Things kinda changed for me at that point as I still have never seen the endgame content and this is my first chance at it. One of our members has only been playing for six weeks! So this was big for a few of us. It went well. We worked our way through and even downed Plagueworks! My officers were there on time and my raid leader was very very patient and wonderful. She has her LK on a differnt server and is a seasond raiders.
SO, yesterday we had sign ups for Tempest mount run, and it kinda flopped. I was a little mad at first, but then remembered it’s just pixels. The members who couldn’t make it were cool as they sent me ingame mail, and those that were there were casual about it. I do have to say at this point, I really like my guildies, and being in a casual guild rocks.
After this experience, I’ve come to answer many of these questions.
1. If you sign up, and your kids doesn’t take the baseball bat to the front window at 8pm with it being 40 degrees outside, then you need to be there on time and ready to go.
2. If the event doesn’t go off as planned, you are free! In the case of last night, we decided to help other guildies lvl and do some farming. A few of us got into the Elemental Raid in SW! As with ICC being a 2 day raid for us, you are not allowed to pug it. Anything else is fair game.
3. We are a casual raiding guild. Growing! So right now, it sucks when people can’t make it. And for now we will hold out for our fellow guildies. I’ve already announced that as we grow the raids will go according to those that sign up. First come first server, and then we’ll take alts. EG, we have 16 people sign up for ICC. Your over 10 min late with no notice (via ingame mail or log onto vent to give a head up), we’ll fill your slot with #11, then #12 ect…
4. Pugging ICC opens up after 1pm on Sun as our final raid time is 9am to 1pm server.
Time to eat!!!
Seems like fair rules to me. Sorry my spam filter snagged your comment but I rescued it!
I’m not sure I could come up with a hard-and-fast rule here.
Generally speaking, if I’m signed up to raid tonight, I’m signed up to raid. And *if* we don’t have what we need to do X, but we *can* do Y, then even if I’m not especially enthused about Y, I don’t mind doing it.
Partly that’s because the fun of raiding for me is not *just* working on progression or winning phat lootz — it’s doing stuff with my guildies and talking crap on vent etc. Another factor is that we have some people who have limited time available, and I wouldn’t want to effectively deny them raiding for a week because I don’t feel like fighting Malygos again.
That said, if I know that I’m not essential to the raid i.e. we have someone else who can fill my role for the evening, and I don’t much like the new plan, then I’d see about swapping myself out.
Mostly this is a moot point — I’m still new enough to the raiding scene that there isn’t much I’m tired of, and there’s still plenty to do. Last night we had enormous fun doing the first 9 bosses in ICC, with four of us on alts/offspecs, and one new guildmember on her first visit to ICC.
And next week we’ll go finish Firefighter … <3 Mimi!
I feel like it’s different if you create a “point” to it. Like “let’s get on alts and practice our alt skills” because it’s different (letting the healers cut loose and DPS for a night is definitely a short-term remedy for “healer fatigue). Or “let’s work toward X achievement as a guild.” (Although sometimes I think some “goals” are more worthy than others, I recognize that I’m probably the scroogiest most pragmatic of the bunch since achievements and mounts aren’t even worthy of mention.)
I think of my sign ups as being for “the 9 to 12 slot of Wednesday”, not for “the first 6 bosses on heroic”. If we’re going somewhere else, I might whine, but I’ll go along with the rest, unless they really don’t need me. I have bailed out of a few runs, but it was lower tier stuff (Ulduar instead of ICC) and I had an actual RL reason, like being very tired or having a headache. Since I’m an officer, I have to do things I don’t particularly enjoy… but as long as it keeps the guild happy, it’s alright. (Yes, this has included going back and wiping on Firefighter time and time again
)
Our main runs are always for progression content and if we can’t get enough people, we just cancel them. From then on, everyone’s free to do whatever. If enough people want to clear something old-school, the officers will probably try to organize it or find a raid leader, but the people who don’t want to join aren’t penalized.
It sort of blends when you have a RL reason to go. If I’m feeling sick, I’ll stick it out (even if I didn’t go to work that day!) because the team needs me for Lich King. But if it’s a “fun run,” wild horses aren’t going to keep me from Nyquil + bed.
I’m a co-GM of our guild and as such I frankly do not allow myself much of selfishness when it comes to situations like that – I feel obligated to set examples and that means in 9.5 out of 10 cases I support whatever the RLs decide.
I do agree however that you should try to find suitable replacements: the same tier of content is acceptable, or trying to clear slightly older content that is still missing on your guild’s progress list (if you are in fact that type of guild).
If our leadership decided to replace that ICC run with Naxx or some other ‘useless’ option however, that’s where my 0.5% would come into play. I don’t like to waste people’s time personally and running an old instance just for raiding’s sake is daft. there’s plenty of other things people can do and sometimes an unexpected offnight is welcome (we have a rather high average age in our guild, so it’s not like the world ends if there’s no raid once in a while). I would definitely speak out in such a case and vote against going on.
It is a delicate balance between being a team player and making sure you are still having “fun” in-game. I fully admit that officers/gms are (rightly or wrongly) expected to “take one for the team” more than the average member, and are held to a higher standard. When I was an officer, you’d better believe that I was a lot more willing to bust my ass with useless crap that doesn’t benefit ME personally. Hell, I used to LEAD the lower-tier runs to help people gear up.
I think they’re rightly expected to do that. As officer/GM, I’m supposed to set the tone. What will everyone think if I keep bailing out of runs? At least that’s the way I see it.
(Thankfully, we’re a small guild and we’re pretty much friends with everyone, so they can understand if RL hits an officer and we’ve never had drama.)
I really, REALLY dislike when officers think they’re entitled to more than the average guild member. The way I see it, it’s the opposite – we’re here to serve the guild, we’re supposed to “sacrifice” more. I used to be in a guild where the officers threw fits when they weren’t chosen for the team… I’ve always given up my spot if someone else wanted to raid :/ Looks like it’s the right attitude, since my current is much nicer than the previous one…
I’m also of the opinion that being an officer is a (thankless and sometimes sucky) job and not a perk bestowed on long-time members so they can gossip in secret channels.
This guy did try to do things for the guild, he just felt he “deserved” some kind of reward for his (sometimes misguided) efforts. I’m very glad I left that guild
(And after seeing my boyfriend raid lead for about a year, I have the utmost respect for anyone who can deal with that and not break down completely. The “I don’t want to raid with X”, “I won’t come unless Y also comes”, “I want this boss and not that” would make me flip out.)
Oooh, seems like this is a hot topic this week, check out Muradin Musings:
http://muradinmusings.blogspot.com/2010/11/self-interest-vs-greater-good.html
Hi Zelmaru-
Seems like a number if us are dealing with these issues right now. I think it’s probably being exacerbated by the end of expansion. Some people are feeling frantic and wanting to make that final push, while others are having a hard time just showing up.
Overall, I tend to feel like the reserved “official guild nights” are for whatever current content the guild is working on. I’m going in with the attitude that I’m there to heal whatever, whether that’s extending the lockout or starting fresh.
If we don’t get enough raiders showing up, then we typically ask our raiders what they would prefer, either pug some players, do old content or call the raid. The result usually depends on how many people are missing.
If the decision is to do old content, people are not obligated to come.
The specific situation I was referring to in my post had one major difference. We had taken a vote the previous week and it was known going in what the plan was. It was a plan that had an overwhelming majority vote. At that point, I do think it is the responsibility of the raiders who show up to put forth their best effort. Even if the vote didn’t go their way.
BTW- Thank you for the link!
As a raid leader I have been saying those exact words a lot lately. Attendance sucks crap for the last 2 months. As raid leader I am stuck with no choice what so ever, I have to do something or people complain.
For me it becomes a choice of doing something as a team or letting everyone go their own way. That really leaves me no option. I have to run something even if I do not want to. I do it for the team and even if I were only a raider and not the raid leader I would still do the same thing.
Like this week I did RS25 on my main in a pug and we are doing a RS10 tonight so I will bring my priest being I know that healers are usually what we are short on for fridays. If another healer shows I can always bring my shaman or mage or even druid to tank. I would have never done RS25 on my main if I knew it would mean me not going to a guild run later in the week.
I guess for me it is different. As a raid leader I have to go even if I do not want to. In a way, it is annoying as hell when I am stuck doing an old run because enough did not show and yet those people go and pug ICC because we did not go. At the moment I let it slide being it is the end of the expansion. But if they do that next cycle, they will get a swift guild kick and they are well aware of that.
What killed us more then the end of the expansion is that we are a 10 man guild and everyone wanted to run 25s. Being we only can do one now it screwed us over big time. People have been pugging 25s for so long that they stayed with doing those for the better gear so they do not show up for the 10s and who am I to blame them. If I were not the raid leader I would be doing the exact same thing.
You can’t keep everyone happy. I’m one of those raiders that would rather have the event just plain CANCELLED if the signups aren’t there 24 hours in advance, so I know and can plan to go out with friends or whatever. Others feel betrayed if you call the event that early without waiting to see who shows up or looking into alternatives. There is no winning in raid leading.