Casual raiding guild blues

I am anticipating disaster.  This will be followed by resentment.  Then the exodus will occur.  It's the mmorpg casual guild Circle of Life.

When we have new content released, a lot of our guild members get back in the game.  They play much more and want to do all the new content right away.  MOST of these folks have not finished the old content, since they got bored with it.  They have not maxxed out their gear.  They have not tried the content on the PTR or followed it online.  Without thinking about it, they want to get carried through content.  Some of them have been grinding out their gear, pugging some raids, and getting better, but have not joined a team or formed a team of their own.

Our guild has over 200 people, on 450 characters.  Most of the gulidies are real people, with real lives, family, school, work, jail time to serve, etc.  They understand that if they can't attend our posted raid times, that they can try again with us next week, do other stuff or join a PuG.  I encourage people to find friends within the guild to play with regularly.  Make 5 man or 10 man teams.  Set up their own group within the guild.  Make it a community.  So far, we have 2 10 man teams.  So 20 people are accounted for.  There will be at least a dozen more people who feel, since I am guild leader, I should find a team for them.  I can't do that.  I am busy with playing the game myself.  Me and the other guild officers have taken a lot of time to work on our guild - decent forums, lots of encouragement, creating a safe, friendly place to play with lots of other people.  I can't make a team for everybody, then make sure everybody show up every time, and when they dont show up, find somebody to fill . . .I do that on MY team.

I don't mean to be dismissive, but everybody needs to play the game for themselves.  I would love for a few extra people to take the initiative of building a team.  I want everybody to have fun, but I can't make them do it.

Holiday gaming

Most of my guildies are adults.  Most of the folks I play with have jobs, spouses, kids. . . basically we almost all have real-lives that limit our access to WoW.  No time is this more apparent than during the holidays.  Scheduling raids and guild events is really tricky this time of year.

There is a great tradeoff because of this.  Since we're all adults; because we've all played for years; because we've all played together for a long time;  we don't mind missing a week of raiding.  Let me clarify: we all want to play and have fun, but nobody is pissed-off about missing our raid night.

Last night we only had 3 people on from our 10-man raid team.  /shrug  I was on, but had no problem logging out and watching tv with Missus Bhorg.  I wanted to get some more ToC in (my priest still needs LOADS of gear), but I'm not horribly worried about it.

I guess this is what it means to be 'casual'.

When we do raid, we have lots of fun, we typically progress pretty well.  Our communication is good.  We understand the encounters beyond just our own role in them.  We are creative and open-minded with strategy.  When we find a good strategy for us, we refine it and stick with it.  Basically, we have lots of fun and win more than we lose.  It's nice to be able to play casually and still have that level of development within the game.