Really, I'm just curious, as I don't play in a raiding guild anymore, but from what it seems, many guilds are having troubles with The Burning Crusade coming. The smaller raid sizes (25 man), and the fact that everyone will re-enter level-grinding has been taking quite a toll on a number of guilds.

My question, then, is how is your guild taking it, and do you have any advice to offer other guilds who might be struggling. Granted, most of this would be speculative simply because TBC hasn't been released yet, but I'm curious how things are going, and how everyone's coping with the inevitable drama.

Our guild is actually set well for the smaller raid sizes as we have always raided in smaller skill groups. Don't have the consistent numbers for the 40 mans. We are trying to recruit push for more. It has caused a lot of drama with 2 arguements. Why the hell do you want to raid 40 mans when TBC is coming in a month? Why they hell aren't we raiding? To which the first question applies. Lots of drama has ensued.

Prior to the 2.0 patch we were doing 40 person Raids and were about to take on Rag. Post 2.0, we saw a big shift to do PvP because of the rewards there were easily gotten. It seems to have hit Horde guilds a little harder since we don't have the same numbers as the Alliance on most servers. I have friends who are on PvE servers who play alliance and say they don't have problems filling out RAIDS.

We are now trying to partner with other guilds to finish up the 40 person RAIDs, but we are pretty set to do 25 person RAIDs once everyone hits 70.

I predict that Blizzard will adjust the RAID rewards to make them more desireable then the PvP rewards. This seems to be how they operate.

Toddler

Our guild was created a few weeks ago with the sole intention of BC content. Currently, we are raiding Ony, ZG and AQ20 strictly for building a smaller community. We are raiding Ony currently with about 25 each time.

My guild has been together for over a year now, and I consider us to be a raiding guild. We've killed Instructor in Naxx and are up to Huhu in AQ40, but with the expansion coming out soon, we have been having serious attendance problems. One of the factors of this is the AQ40 vs. Naxx battle, which I blame Blizzard for putting two instances out so close together. The other problem is the expansion. Many of our members have given up hoping to get better gear in a few weeks without the extreme raiding costs. We still schedule 40 mans, and plan to do so even when the expansion comes out, to keep us together. For now, we schedule and hope to have enough, and if we don't, we do premade WSG or AB to kill the time.

I have managed to evade the death spiral all raiding guilds suffer from in the long run and what I have found is that in order to have a strong group for raiding you need not only skilled people but also very friendly "unselfish" players.
My guild is cored within a social guild and as a casual raiding guild we have tons of fun while raiding. We control our growth and make people understand that raiding in our guild is a priveledge, to be earned every day. Most likely tho, and we have had our share of single man drama in the past, I set core rules that govern from top to bottom (and I as Guild Master, am NOT above the law). I think it is important to bind our guild together and give it a foundation for when confusion does strike.
This seems to work well for me as does insuring everyone that is ranked as a raiding member can get the oportunity to raid and not be locked out by the schedule hogs.
Our code of conduct is real and also binding and I severely punish those that knowingly step afoul of it.
Above all the bottom line in reality is, this is just a friggin game....get a grip...go cool down and come back and talk when you are in control of your self and civil again.
This should carry us successfully forward into the Burning Crusade era and beyond I believe, I think tho, that it wil be tested.
But then...thats just me

This has been a very traumatic time for our guild. We were what you might think of as a mid tier guild on the server. Certainly not cutting edge but through MC, ZG, AQ20, and starting BWL when this whole thing hit.

We experienced much the same split as Sardorun described with why should I raid when I can PVP and BC is coming out / and why aren't we raiding. The result was an exodus from the guild of the geared raiders to higher level or same level guilds who were also having difficulty filling 40 mans.

The Rank 2 Guild on the server split and the off shoot started taking players from everywhere and basically raped us.

Its been a sad time and the core of players left who have gear are facing another 6 months in MC gearing up another set of players before we can begin BWL again... [I'm tired just thinking about it]

Of course with the BC coming out there will be opportunities to level and raid in the 25 man areas, and we've made alliances with other guilds in filling their raids etc. Hey, I can't complain... my priest has gained 5/8 T2 in the process without spending any guild dkp. Other classes are not so lucky and I'm getting guff from other guidies... one was pretty funny tho. He wanted me to leave the NAXX raid I was in to come heal in UBRS for an attunement run that was an unscheduled pug, and got quite pissy when I told him no we can do it tomorrow.

Ah well, it had to hit around the holidays as well which is frequently a difficult time for guilds. I expect a lot of guild shuffling in the next 30 days and want to pass along something I heard one GM say.

"Friends are friends no matter the tag over their heads."

Our guild can not be readily classified. We have over 450 accounts. Pvping is up, and a lot of people are out grinding things that they want to finish before BC. Our raiding is down quite a bit. We aren't worried at all though. We quest together and have a good time in PvP. The raiding will pick back up. It is actually a nice break for most of us to explore other things and get our zeal back.

We are a casual raiding guild, and shockingly enough, one of the top raiding guilds on our server. We are a big family and we are all very happy being in such a friendly helpful guild with great leaders.

A lot of the newer 60s are running a lot of instances and doing some raiding. This lets the people that still want to raid, to raid. We also get to re-explore instances with much improved gear and have a very casual approach to it.

Oh great Obiwan, please impart upon us your gifts of guild happiness knowledge, they elude me atm.

My folks are pvp crazy right now, so its cool, I'm leveling an alt lol.

Hopefully we'll be able to pare down our membership to the fun fun guys and we'll love TBC, but who knows?

This is another problem I have with talk running through the Sr Members of our guild. Some of them just want to start openenly booting people that don't make it to level 70 in a certain amount of time. They justify it saying that we would be cutting the dead weight. I am just not open to booting people just because they are more casual than others. I'd rather they leave on their own if they feel left behind or unable to compete for raid spots.

That's why only I can boot

Some of my officers have itchy boot button fingers lol

Reading this makes me feel a lot better. Our guild had been together a little longer then two months and had downed Neff twice in that time span. However once "the patch" came out everything changed. People were playing without mods that they had used for a very long time, and we fell on our face on razorgore. Which then prompted 2 officers some of their in game friends to bolt citing that there standards were to high for ours.
Then another faction of our guild left to re start their old pvp guild which basically cut us in half. So we went from the 2nd or 3rd horde guild on the server to a shell of a guild within two weeks. Not to mention the 5-10 people that are taking a break from the game untill xpac.
All this to say we have a hard time filling 20 man raids and are often pugging with other top guilds on the server for fun now. We are in a pretty good place, but trying to organize a raid with half pugs is really taxing and i would stop doing it but you have that group that asks question #2(why arent we raiding).
There have been some good things too though. We have thinned out some people that were constantly unhappy regardless of what we did. We also have the ability to reavaluate our ranks and procedures becuase some of them were broken. So in the long run i think that we will be better off from this change.
i will freaking laugh my @$$ off when blizzard decides to re-introduce 40 man content again about 6 months after xpac though. I can just see it coming.

I also feel better after reading a lot of this. It's exactly what is happening to us. We've always been a smaller guild, with just enough people to raid and not much of a waiting list, if any. We were clearing MC in one night and heading into BWL. We had lost a bit of attendance when we went into BWL...normal stuff...and we were getting to 4 eggs left with 33/34 people and not really the right class spread. We were pretty encouraged by that...then 2.0 hit.

Suddenly, seemed like over night, we were down to 22 - 25 steady raiders. Same thing - some people went to the bigger guilds who could pull them through the higher end raids right away and get them their gear faster. Some went strictly pvp.

We are also in a bit of a flux right now...a lot of people want to pvp and our 20-man raid nights have fallen victim to that. But people are having fun pvp'ing, so it's not a huge deal at the moment. We continue to schedule raids for the "why aren't we raiding" crowd and can kill Ony and get through most of MC with what numbers we have left. We're recruiting hard core and waiting for the BC and will evaluate what to do with what we have and what we can recruit.

We're finding that what we are left with are the people who are going to form a very friendly, close-knit "core". We'll have to take a step back and kind of start over, but actually with the extra levels, we should be able to get back into BWL with the numbers we have and hopefully do better. We still want to see the instance regardless of whether the gear in the BC is better.

It's nice knowing we're not alone and my "cheerleading" posts to my guild can reflect that and hopefully make us all feel better. It's hard to keep everyone encouraged when they are watching others jump ship.

Speaking of...I need to bump my request for that cheerleader smiley.

My guild has experianced alot of the same concerns. The only difference is I started this guild with TBC in mind.

Now the only problem is guild size. I started with the idea to keep it small but that just doesnt seem the case. I am not worried yet though. Natural attrition will whittle down the number leaving the core raiding group hopefully.

As far as I can tell the events of december has impacted just about any guild.

1. The beta players (I have a beta account as well) announced that even naxx gear would be replaced within weeks of starting on xpack (level 70 5 man dungeons blue items will easily replace even the best of naxx gear.) And mc and bwl stuff replaced almost litterarly by the next blue you find in the xpack. Which takes away alot of the motivation for raiding when you take away the "great item" reward.

2. Then they hit us with a patch that preety much junked almost every major mod out there, and it was sometimes weeks until a reliable replacment for core mods for raiding to be found. Which espicially for high end encounters like some found in naxx made the fights SIGNIFICANTLY harder. And we felt like we "regressed" in progress and would take weeks to recover. - kudos to chops for having working mods related to dkpsystem ready on day one of that patch. (minor bug aside)

3. They made the pvp high rank set (relatively) easy to attain. For the most part the epic pvp set is on par with, if not better then tier2, for most classes, especially for quick leveling in xpack. Which had us lose much of our motivation to even revisit our "old haunts" of bwl mc, ony etc.

4. For our guild, we were preety burned out from 4-5+ nights a week raiding 4-5 hours week after week, and many of us were looking for an excuse to take a break, and as well as many members of the guild disappering (not have access to internet) for the holidays.

All of that added up to my guild (7 bosses down in naxx) turning into a loose pvp guild until xpack with occasional 20 man raids with our alts etc. We also lost a few which is fine as we need to go from filling 40 man raids to 25.

I've heard alot of the same concerns and problems. And TBC is def a big part of the lack of attendance. I think many people have been raiding for so long that they have seen the time between when TBC was announced up until next week as a time to either rush, rush and get things finished or to slow down and take a break before the new content comes out.

Guild splits and merges and new start ups seem to be happening a ton all over the place. Usually when one person leaves it starts the flood tide and their posse's go with them.

And I agree-- I went through a very sad (to me) guild split a few months ago --the good friends will stay your friends no matter what guild they are in...but they are def harder to keep in contact with when they're not in your own guild The split def put me in a funk that I am hoping TBC will help pull me out of. I have characters in two different guilds-- one to hide away from drama that I'm so tired of and one to play and enjoy my time in when I do want to do group runs. I hope TBC jump starts my desire to raid again.

I heard that tier 1 gear would be good until around level 65 blue gear.

LoP has always struggled with numbers. We basically 30 manned MC until finding a guild, having numbers issues themselves, to fill our empty spots and throw us over the bump that was Rag. 41 point talents coming after that have made it a little easier as well.

We are a casual guild. While we have an apping process, we tend to throw automatic invites to friends and family. We have no requirements for raid attendance. Or spec.

And a lot of us want to experience the content we have paid for but haven't seen yet. And it appears that as we level to 70 we will be working BWL, AQ40 and Naxx. Not to farm it for gear, but to kill everything Blizz has put in the game.

As one of my officers likes to say, "I enjoy dying in new places."

basically we are a smaller guild on azgalor. we can do mc and what not and have a good amount of people that are in tier 2 gear. Prev pias members. anyways that is going to be our main raiding group for TBC but we are also setting up a secondary raid group as well for those people with less gear.

we will be having some of the more geared out people helping out with this 2nd group as well. mainly tanks/healers.

beyond that we are going to be just fine with the xpac comeing out this tues.

My experience so far is that Tier 1 is replaced with level 60 and 61 quest rewards and boss drops from Ramparts and Blood Furnace.