Too many guilds, not enough players?

[IceMan1763]

I'm not interested in raiding. And seems to me you are white knighting retarded GMs who wanna recruit imaginary raides, with perfect gear, perfect legendaries, perfect AP and who already are 7/7 and 3/3.

When I was raiding properly in Wrath, Cata and WoD, it was ALWAYS the smart applicants who turned out to be good players. Just chat with them for few minutes and you will know. Gear, experience or so, does not matter at all.

Well then you completely misunderstand me. The fact the the GMs (and I'm not even an active player right now let alone a GM) need to recruit players like that to clear Mythic content at a reasonable rate is the fault of Blizzard. That is the point I'm trying to make. I hate when people blame GMs for adopting the standards required to clear the content they're trying to clear. Those standards are pretty much set by Blizzard when they design the game. Blizzard's design is stupid, unfair, and goes against the spirit of competition this xpac when it comes to raiding... especially high end raiding.

Raiding was great in the xpacs you mentioned (although I exclude DS from that "great" complement)!

[Kantoro]

People need to remember that just because your write a wall of text, it doesnt make it right.

Quoted for truth.

[clevin]

Don't forget about guild misconceptions/fears, I think even Preacher made a video on this topic...

Many (like really many) people think that guilds are organisations that will take away their freedoms, rights and children, will force them into certain roles/classes/specs, etc. So even people who might be interested in doing harder content, might not want to join a guild...

I see A LOT of people w/o guilds every day o_O

In TBC and even LK you rarely saw this. But as LFD and then LFR made it easy for entry level people to see the raids and perks decreased, a lot of people just don't see the point in a guild. Sometimes, I don't and I've been in the same one since late BC. The thing is, you can do LFD for most 5 mans (aside from Mythics now). You can see the raid in LFR. You can PUG a regular version of the raid (normal or heroic) and since they're flexible player sizes it's super easy in general since they don't fill up.

Given that you can drop most group content without being in a guild then one bad guild experience and people think "why bother?" Layer that on top of what you point out and we see the current situation.

[Gorgodeus]

Well then you completely misunderstand me. The fact the the GMs (and I'm not even an active player right now let alone a GM) need to recruit players like that to clear Mythic content at a reasonable rate is the fault of Blizzard. That is the point I'm trying to make. I hate when people blame GMs for adopting the standards required to clear the content they're trying to clear. Those standards are pretty much set by Blizzard when they design the game. Blizzard's design is stupid, unfair, and goes against the spirit of competition this xpac when it comes to raiding... especially high end raiding.

Raiding was great in the xpacs you mentioned (although I exclude DS from that "great" complement)!

None of this is the fault of Blizzard. There are more than enough players capable of clearing Mythic content. There are simply too many guilds that think they are Mythic capable guilds, and the number of guilds thinking such is too high.

[Sithalos]

And this is why i believe that removing the 10 man format was a mistake. Large formats are better and preferable no doubt, but the game doesn't support them totally anymore.

Agreed.

It's hard enough for my guild to get our 13ish core people on, let alone a solid 20.

[ThePants999]

This problem has always existed and will always exist.

The key issue is the "stickiness" of the guild community combined with the cyclic nature of subscriptions. If ten Mythic raiding guilds start an expansion with 25 players each, and each loses 5 players who decide they've seen enough of the new expansion, you basically have zero viable raiding guilds - whereas if two of them disbanded, the other eight could get back up to 25. This is obviously a contrived example, but the point remains - guilds fighting for their own survival remove a lot of fluidity from the raiding population. Clearly, it's totally understandable and I don't have a solution - and yet, if you reach the point where your guild is cancelling raids because of too few signups, do consider that letting the poor thing die and letting its members find happy new homes might be the best solution for literally everyone ;-)

[Alvito]

And this is why i believe that removing the 10 man format was a mistake. Large formats are better and preferable no doubt, but the game doesn't support them totally anymore.

Jumping to 20 for the hardest difficulty was the kiss of death for raiding on several servers. Having guilds that were fully clearly SoO heroic only to not be able to inflate to 20 was brutal. It killed raiding on my old server. Several guilds were raiding partially or clearing SoO in heroic only to be locked out as soon as heroic became mythic and was locked at 20. Which caused another population issue with many of the top guilds and players leaving for the top 4 or 5 servers immediately fixing some of their roster issues and being the kill shot for the server they left.

[Sentynel]

The amount of people playing this xpac is falling off a cliff right now. They're already pretty much at end of WOD activity levels.

And do you have any numbers to support your claim besides your friend list / guild roster?

Of course not.

[Bullettime]

The absurd mythic+ grind going on for raiding guilds probably isn't helping much.

[Deleted]

Well then you completely misunderstand me. The fact the the GMs (and I'm not even an active player right now let alone a GM) need to recruit players like that to clear Mythic content at a reasonable rate is the fault of Blizzard. That is the point I'm trying to make. I hate when people blame GMs for adopting the standards required to clear the content they're trying to clear. Those standards are pretty much set by Blizzard when they design the game. Blizzard's design is stupid, unfair, and goes against the spirit of competition this xpac when it comes to raiding... especially high end raiding.

Raiding was great in the xpacs you mentioned (although I exclude DS from that "great" complement)!

Ok sorry, I read you wrong. I agree with what you said. But I would partially blame also the mythic guilds. They have access to all these logs and twitch streams of top guilds and top players. And they think it's the standard they should aspire to. Which is completly false. They think they should be clearing mythic content within 2-3 weeks max. But reality is, they compare themself to the best of the best, to the most dedicated. They will never be able to raid at that level unless they are one of those guilds, which in most cases they are not.

Same with doing Mythic+ 5 man runs. People watch streams of best players in the world pulling 600k dps single target on dungeon bosses and over a 1 mil dps on trash packs. And they think this is the norm, that everyone should be like that. Nope, you gotta realise that there are better players out there and if you can't be on their level don't expect others to be.

Also DS was dog shit, made me quit WoW for a long time.

[IceMan1763]

And do you have any numbers to support your claim besides your friend list / guild roster?

Of course not.

Yep... Warcraft Census.

Do you have anything to show that player activity is up? Thought so.

Until you convince Blizzard to release sub numbers again I'm going with the only measurement I know of.

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Nope, you gotta realise that there are better players out there and if you can't be on their level don't expect others to be.

Also DS was dog shit, made me quit WoW for a long time.

You see, this is where we GREATLY differ on how we view the level of play at the top end of the game in this xpac. Believe this or not, to me it makes no difference, but in Cata I raided with a guild that did 12 hours of raiding per week, many people didn't play their mains a ton beyond raiding hours, and we were top 100 US.

I believe there is a much bigger pool of players that are capable of clearing the "hardest" content than you do. You believe there is this small "dedicated" group of players who are the best and everyone else is bad and just a wannabe whiner.

The thing is, Legion has made a new differentiation this xpac and it means that skill is not the biggest factor in determining mythic clear success rate. I would hypothesize that mythic raid clear success rate is almost exactly correlated to total M+ dungeon clears by the raid group as a whole. That just takes loads of free time... those players are not any more skilled, on the average, than players who in the past could have a day job and still compete at the highest levels of the game, like me, for example.

These players who are clearing mythic raids first these days aren't incredibly skilled... they're just unemployed or making scraps from RL $ mythic clear sales and Twitch welfare so they have the time to actually grind to the levels which are required in this xpac.

[Deleted]

Destroying the concept of guilds on the lower difficulty levels leads to a situation where the top-end guilds don't have enough people.

It works just like outsourcing does in real-life.
1) Company outsources all "easy / entrylevel" jobs to low-cost countries.
2) Company hires only seniors
3) Company doesn't realize that in order to have seniors, you need have juniors as well
4) Company doesn't hire juniors because all junior jobs went offshore
5) Company complains there's not enough people to recruit..

That's pretty much where WoW is at the moment. You only need to guild up if you're going to raid mythic. Everything else is freely puggable and you don' t have to follow any rules - just queue up, at your own convenience.

Mythic guilds on the other hand - need something else - but that recruitment base is pretty thin and getting thinner all the time.

[Insofin]

There are mainly 2 problems when it comes to population:
1. Too many "big/small" servers. There are servers with a huge quantity of players, and servers that are almost dead.

2. Too many small guilds. Yeah, everyone's looking for people and blame the "emptiness" noone applys, but the truth is that there are too many 10-15man raiding guilds. You just need to check their raiding schedule. On my realm, 90% of the recruiting guilds raid from Sunday to Thursday between 8:30PM and 1:30AM (in a 3-hour block more or less). All of them are recrtuiting. That means there are enough raiders to raid, but too many guilds.

[Deleted]

The recruitment situation appears to be in dire straits. So many guilds on my server (I imagine others) are recruiting, and no one is biting. I post my recruitment macro into trade chat often, I maintain 3 forum threads, and I actively seek out people on the forums and hardly any bites. I think a lot of guilds filled their Legion rosters with what I call "expansion hoppers" (basically people that re-sub for new expacs, and unsub shortly thereafter) and are now hurting. The game seems to be quite dead, and I was just wondering if others are feeling the same.

This is the main reason I only recruit for Heroic raiding. Maintaining a 20-man roster is just a recruitment nightmare, and with the state of the game nowadays, I would literally be spending most of my free time on the forums looking for people. Most "mythic" guilds on my server are pugging anyway, and I don't see the fun in that.

Dull people insisting on playing in their own pile of sand, however small it is.
You would find bigger guilds with military and ex-military cultures, for obvious reasons.

[Deavane]

To those who are getting a lot of apps - how many are coming from lower level dissolving guilds?

- - - Updated - - -



Right - how many people actually have 20 people they want to hang out and play with? Most groups end at 6 or 7, and twenty is also too many for people to be able to just chill out and banter during raids.

I enjoy hanging out with just about everyone in my raid group. With regards to your first question, the vast majority of recruits will come from a guild with less progress than mine (not by much though in my guild's case). As an example, my guild is US top 50. I would say there are people as far back US top 200 that we'd be happy to recruit because they play their class well and can handle the raid environment we offer.

[Deleted]

Yes trying to make trade some sort of guildchat but most of the few still playing on my server(s) are not falling for it.

[cuafpr]

i'm the opposite i'm STILL looking for a guild that is a good fit for me.. i've spent weeks looking/reading guild sites/comparing raid times .. I found one that is ok, really nto bad i'm just under-geared and under perform as DPS for them currently so i'm an alt for mythic raid nights and and the new HC clears are on a day i can't raid right now so idk what will happen. I'd rather be a tank than dps anyways. I can't belive how many guilds raid sunday and monday nights now...

[unfilteredJW]

They made receiving loot not fun.

It feels like reforging is in the game again and each time I get a drop, I dread it. Especially if I see orange.

[Azzurri]

I think they're two problems.

1. I just think they're are so many guilds per server and cliques that competing with literally 100's of guilds on your server hurts.

2. Low pop servers don't have enough people.

You can fix number 2, but number 1 is a little harder to fix, unless you out a cap on guilds on a server which wouldn't end well.

[Sentynel]

Yep... Warcraft Census.

Do you have anything to show that player activity is up? Thought so.

Until you convince Blizzard to release sub numbers again I'm going with the only measurement I know of.

How can YOU help? By taking a census of your own server using the CensusPlus UI Mod and submitting the data here! The more data we get, the more accurate and current this display becomes!

What an accurate source of player census