Raid Team Motivation, Failure and Regrouping

Tomorrow is another reset, this last weeks raiding has been what I would mildy consider a train wreck, the week before was barely any better.

Signups have dropped and the experienced players have stopped signing due to lack of progress.

This is exactly the kind of situation that happens within almost every guild, if you dont keep the pace up people lose interest quickly and your back to gearing new players up who are full of enthusiams while the already geared players get bored and vanish.

So the question is how do you inject a little more life into the team and get things back on track?


Well there are a number of things that we are trying one of them being a much tighter control on who is ready for what. One of the big things to remember in raiding is when to push forward and not give up and when to call it a day and regroup to come back in another time.

Part of the situation is my fault, pushing too hard and expecting some lower performing members to pull themselves up to a level that is beyond their experience and quality of kit. This leads to the higher performing members not viewing them in the correct light, extra pressure and frusatrations mount up and then all sorts of dissention starts to happen.

I'll take some responsability for this, but I wont take it all. There are some members who let us down by not pitching up, this leaves us filling spots with members that are less than optimal in that role or that are inexperienced in those fights leaving us to explain tactics again and recement the team. That's the cause of the initial problem compounded by beligerence and determination.

So what i've done is gone through the whole guild, reranked members depending on if they have the kit, skill and experience to clear ToC in about an hour and half, deleted all my other raids from the calendar and invited just the people who had made that rank or above.

I've sent a mass mail out to the whole guild explaining what I have done, I then sent a mail out to all 16 of those people I considered the best in the guild advising them of a personal team invite and that I am looking for at least a 4 week commitment for our raid nights to get ToC progressed into 10 man heroic mode (we are normal mode up and down at the moment). I have also sent an in game mail asking everyone to signup to the forums as they are missing vital information, but my experience on this tells me that we shall get about 20-30 people and the rest of the guild wont bother with forums, that's just the way it is and you cant force people.

So my calendar invites are set, my people chosen and the mails sent letting them know this is serious business. Next we wait for a couple of days and see the response from these people and that will tell us if we have a solid quality 10 man team to hammer out ToC into Heroic ToC in the next 4 weeks.

In the meantime I have spoken to our GM and another officer and member about running some gearing up raids for non progression content (read Ulduar, VoA, Ony) for those members who have not made the cut yet.

All members have been invited to request a review where they could get ranked up and invited to progression content but one of these reviews is not an easy way up, it involves a great deal of checking on my part and effort on theirs, but that's another post ;)

So to be clear about this, taking firm, decisive action is the way forward, even if it doesnt work 100% I can say that I didnt sit back on my arse and do nothing.

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