What Guild "Tests" do you use for Raiding Applicants?

[Tradewind]

Which fool would not pick the "best looking" answer to such questions? Even if getting loot actually is their only goal, who would say so in a guild application?

You'd be surprised haha, that one was usually an instant fail.

I mean, sure it was being honest and I commend them but c'mon. I think it's safe to assume if I am asking them the question it's pretty clear what my philosophy is Would have been a good time for that person to just close the app and move on lol. I like to think it gave insight into what my expectations were though, without drilling it into their heads with some speech or some shit.

[Deleted]

I know everything there is to know about my class (Rogue). I can give them facts and various thoughts on how to improve myself (or the bullshit question "how would you be an asset to our raiding team?").
But anything beyond that type of information is, in my opinion, bullshit.

They want to know you through a series of fucked up questions, to see what kind of person you are, even though it actually says absolutely nothing about who you are.

Guild applications are often worse, more abstract, than if you would go to a job interview.

It's just bullshit for the sake of "keeping up appearances", trying to make the guild itself look good.

[Deleted]

I mean, sure it was being honest and I commend them but c'mon.

Sure. Being honest of course is nice and all...but really, I feel like it should be common sense that answering such a question with yes is an obvious insta-fail in pretty much every case. It's like going to a job interview and saying that you won't ever do more than absolutely necessary but don't really care to begin with. ^^"

[4KhazModan]

I once joined a guild that in the application asked for the answer to the question that was in the terms of service. The Question was easy once you found it, just the name of the server we were on.

[lunchbox2042]

My guild tends to automatically skip over applications that are poorly written. People who can't put enough thought into a few questions can't be trusted to stay alive when there's multiple things going on at once.

[Overdispersion]

Sure. Being honest of course is nice and all...but really, I feel like it should be common sense that answering such a question with yes is an obvious insta-fail in pretty much every case. It's like going to a job interview and saying that you won't ever do more than absolutely necessary but don't really care to begin with. ^^"

And yet I have to answer if I have been involved in terrorist activites in the ESTA application every time I travel to the US. I guess those stupid questions exist for a reason.

[Tradewind]

Sure. Being honest of course is nice and all...but really, I feel like it should be common sense that answering such a question with yes is an obvious insta-fail in pretty much every case. It's like going to a job interview and saying that you won't ever do more than absolutely necessary but don't really care to begin with. ^^"

Hence it was usually an instant fail :P Such an egregious lack of common sense should be a warning to all.

[Deleted]

Should pretty much answer an application with this video:

[nukie]

My guild used to pit applicants against eachother.

They had to explain why their application was better than the others we already received and pointing out flaws in other people's applications.

And then they had to perform against eachother in raids. We usually only recruited the person with the highest DPS or healing and told the others we were sorry but they weren't what we were looking for.

This sounds fun! And healthy (no flame wars ever started from the app critique process im sure..)

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Ok not a contraction but you understand what I mean though.

Sure, you're saying if you were applying to your guild you should get turned away for using "ok" in place of "okay".

[shortleif]

"The only thing that should matter is someone's performance!" - half the people here

Do you seriously not give a shit about the kind of people that you'll spend thousands of hours together with?

Some questions/test here are stupid. But trying to find out if a person is a good fit socially in a guild can be pretty damn important.

[Nobleshield]

"The only thing that should matter is someone's performance!" - half the people here

Do you seriously not give a shit about the kind of people that you'll spend thousands of hours together with?

Some questions/test here are stupid. But trying to find out if a person is a good fit socially in a guild can be pretty damn important.

I actually agree with this. Ultimately the point of playing WoW is to have fun whether your fun is getting loot, killing bosses, wanting to be the very best like no one ever was, etc. So while your performance matters in most cases (if you're applying to a guild that wants to focus on progression, you need to have a certain level of skill and performance to be useful), the social aspect is more important because you want to hopefully make new friends while you're killing bosses together.

[Deleted]

Oh god, yes. Above all else, above meters, above social crap, above all other factors. TIME MANAGEMENT - in my experience - is what makes or breaks a guild in the long run.

If a guild is starting late and/or letting people take bathroom breaks and let the dog out and god knows what else between every single pull, you're not going to get very far. It's frustrating because I've seen guilds with a lot of great players drag their feet on progression solely because they only get 5 attempts in on a boss in a night or something. Then they wonder, "How come X guild killed it in 3 nights?" and the answer is usually, "Because they got 50 pulls in between those 3 nights."

As a raid leader, and ex progression raiding (real life, and the drudgery known as ulduar after farming for several months killed wow and i never properly got back to progression again), is my biggest annoyance, i run with a couple of others a casual raid team and hate how long it takes people to run in, the people who ninja smoke, the people who CBA to run in, we have exceptions, our main healer if she runs in it takes longer that someone having a ninja break due to loading screen, in raid its fine.

I think the best recruitment philosophy was my old raid leader who whilst he did have a proper form for people to complete, also had 1 mantra

Attitude > Skill > Gear

You can gear someone up
You can train someone to play better
But an arsehole will always produce brown foul smelling solids

[frigoffrick]

I only did serious raiding in Vanilla, TBC and WotLK was very casual. However, when my guild would accept an application, we would just take the person into raids with us, see how they did there. We'd invite them into Ventrilo and that's about it. If they did well at the raid multiple times (didn't die, did good dps/healing), learnt the fights quickly, those were considered good applicants.

[Deleted]

We are currently gearing up someone who just started playing WoW again after leaving in early MoP. No cloak, no gem, he had like 450 ilvl before we took him around timeless isle. However, we are right before WoD, no one needs gear, he will sit on Garrosh if we are doing a sale. But based on what Lei Shi and spaceape just said, I highly doubt they are in any sort of competitive raiding scene. I am checking people apping to a US 12th 10 man guild, I need to make sure they aren't just showing up to try and get some gear, the mount or w/e and then just leave right after.

- - - Updated - - -



I use the default UI, no issues with it. Add-on placement however is.

I am consistently (on progress no gaming encounter) top 10 ranked on every hc fight on my hunter for the last two xpacs as are many of the players I play with. We have a solid core that have raided with the best. We do have guilds on the realm that require writing a load of arbitrary crap some are good most are usually not as good as they think they are and fall into that mediocre category. We are able to bypass the majority of the nonsense that is a guild application because I and nearly all the others in my guild know how to play every class and do so very well. Running a 10 man requires you have several mains. Why would you need an app when a link to logs can say much more. Most players looking for the best progress leave guilds once the content has been cleared and they feel they are adequately geared to apply for yet a better (or more committed) guild for the next tier.

I too use default ui.

[Solial]

I am consistently (on progress no gaming encounter) top 10 ranked on every hc fight on my hunter for the last two xpacs as are many of the players I play with. We have a solid core that have raided with the best. We do have guilds on the realm that require writing a load of arbitrary crap some are good most are usually not as good as they think they are and fall into that mediocre category. We are able to bypass the majority of the nonsense that is a guild application because I and nearly all the others in my guild know how to play every class and do so very well. Running a 10 man requires you have several mains. Why would you need an app when a link to logs can say much more. Most players looking for the best progress leave guilds once the content has been cleared and they feel they are adequately geared to apply for yet a better (or more committed) guild for the next tier.

I too use default ui.

We were 1 main each, no alts / second mains. We do check logs, guild history, how long they were in each guild, how long breaks were, when they killed certain progression bosses and so on. We have a formal application template on our website and we also do apps over mumble. Any app that passes the website one we will talk to on mumble. I think that currently only one of the new people we have recruited have actually applied on our website.

We have gotten a lot of apps who have absolutely terrible applications. No raiding history, no heroic kills, mostly flex / normal gear from pugs and bad logs. We ask people to name their alts on our application so we can look them up if wowprogress doesn't have them, just to make sure they haven't changed mains. All these questions save us time from going over every single detail.

We ask for Btag, name, gender (we have both male and female in raid, just ask for asking), age, time zone, class / classes, armory links to each, a link to relevant logs or parses , do they have any issues meeting our raid times, some "BASIC" information about them outside the game, previous guild history, raiding experience and reason for leaving their old/current guild, why is he applying to us opposed to a different guild, we have some more questions listed as optional such as does he play other games, if he has any questions or comments he would like to add, whatever.

We don't ask for a screen shot UI or a latency test. We do ask if their internet is good enough to raid on and if they ever have dc issues.
We do require people to have their interview on mumble, we use mumble for our raids. I don't have vent or teamspeak, I'm not downloading to interview someone joining my guild. If I was applying to a different guild, I would use their VoIP.

If the person seems decent to us, we will have our mumble interview. We will ask most of the things he already answered on our website, but expect much more detail in answers. The website app can take a whole 5 minutes. Our interviews will last 10-30 minutes. We will just talk about random things and see if we like the person and if we think he would fit in to the guild well. Then we bring them to one of our raids to see how they perform with us. We will give them a role that their class can do where possible. If they aren't padding like idiots, they perform well and we like that person as a raid we will take them, if not we don't.
We had a warlock apply to us one time. On paragons, his first raid with us, he was just padding as much as he could. He got a top 5 parse, but it was all wasted damage and on his first raid with us. We didn't accept him. His dps was decent on the single target bosses, but he didn't go well with the guild. He didn't have a Garrosh mount yet and went on little tantrum when we didn't give him the mount and just let it rot because we all had one. He had good logs, but logs aren't everything.