Guilds are disbanding at an alarming rate.

[Deleted]

Great video by Preach & SignsofKelani

Dark Times Ahead
Why Is WoW Dying? (The title does not do justice)

My personal take

*when I type Mythic kills I obviously mean x/10

Yesterday I was looking for a random person to show off his CM 2hGreatsword (wanted to see how the transmog actually looked on a character) and for some reason we had a little chat; he specified that up to know he has changed up to 6 Guilds in total and currently is 2/10 Mythic; he also stated that the reason he has been moving a lot had nothing to do about his dissatisfaction in every Guild thus far but due to the fact that they were disbanding constantly after a few raid weeks.

From my experience so far I can recall that Guilds, from Highmaul and up to BRF end of March, were reaching their highest level of attendance and participation in Raids; I even recall many melee at that time like DKs including myself, having an extremely hard time finding a Guild to take us on board; competition for melee DPS was brutal and even though allot of Guilds were full, we still had hopes. Guilds advertisements were strict and allot of work had to be done from the individual in order to be recruited. In April however rumours and hearsays of a couple of Guilds disbanding were spreading out but personally I was not alarmed yet; however as time moved forward and May showed up, I started noticing many Guilds of 5 Mythic kills and below recruiting aggressively for a variety of roles. I was still not concerned as I thought it was the natural progression of things; some Guilds will survive in Mythic and others will not.

The more time passed though, the more I was witnessing Guilds of 7 Mythic kills and above literally struggling; it became so depressing that even Guilds with 9 Mythic kills could not raid anymore as a variety of players stopped showing up. Raid attendance became a challenge and eventually it started to snow-ball and virtually affected everyone; Guilds disbanding threads were popping up on the official forums in an explosive manner and the moral of the raiding scene was reaching a new low point.

While I do believe that regardless of what happened, Mythic as a difficulty in BRF would be a deal breaker for a significant number of Guilds, 25-35% as an estimate, what I learned in the end as I was having more and more conversations with different players, was that Raiding alone is not enough to keep a Raider invented in game no matter what. There were a few arguments here and there regarding the love-or-hate-it 20man raid requirement but that position never seemed to win me over.

Why are Guilds disbanding in this expansion? My perspective is merely a personal observation regarding the raid scene so feel free to include disbanding of Guilds of all kinds of shapes and size.

[dope_danny]

Its the old "water wearing down a mountain" situation. Casual players quit, guild chat gets quieter, this makes players more downbeat, lack of content -or updates like the selfie patch- dont pull them back in and the downbeat people decide to follow, the remainder are raiding or people that want to raid but cant get a place then they leave and you are left with your core guild raid team. Now what happens if a key tank or healer burns out? theres no pool of replacements unless you go outside the guild, players see other guilds raiding or looking for their role to be filled and the drift happens.
Eventually you are left with a guild master and his real life friends wondering if they should rebuild from scratch, and if its worth if or if its time to give up on the guild.

It happened in the end of cataclysm in the g auto invite gold rush -not to this staggering extreme level- but still it happens.

[Aeula]

Having the same issue here, the real issue is 'normal' mode. Since you can pug something which can at least be considered 'raiding' (Many don't count LFR as true raiding, hence why it co-existed peacefully with the previous normal and heroic quite well) many people don't see the point in doing higher level difficulties.

Normal is hard enough to require a decent pug, but easy enough that you can't keep a guild going on it, that's its flaw.

On top of this you have the repetitive feel of raids, three difficulties (Not counting LFR) is just way too many if you play for fun and not to chase the carrot that is Ilvl why bother doing heroic when normal is less stressful and doesn't require a set time or group?

[Stormspellz]

its a mix of to much raid tiers, no viable content outside of raiding, and simply 10 year old game.

[Zf]

I also think the difficulty of some of the BRF fights may have something to do with it, especially heroic Blackhand for the more casual-esque guilds. My guild lost 2 main raiders and was on the verge of a complete disband due to high tensions after weeks of working blackhand, luckily we got the kill and every thing worked out. The same thing is starting to happen as we are now 2/10 mythic and working on gruul, people just don't feel like beating their head against a new boss for several more weeks. It just seems like the motivation to get the bosses down has been dwindling this expac.

[Last Starfighter]

Guilds aren't disbanding at an alarming rate due to any problems with raiding. They're disbanding because WoD has been a shit expansion. 3 million people quit. That trickles everywhere.

[Zherod]

All of that with the "summer is coming" on top.

[twh]

Well yeah. More and more people are un-subbing. hopefully another few million will quit so Blizzard will finally wake up and get the message.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Raiding is tougher than its ever been and a lot of people believe the game has little to do.
Its unfortunately, but rumors and alarmism is really hurting the community.

[kamuimac]

*when I type Mythic kills I obviously mean x/10

Yesterday I was looking for a random person to show off his CM 2hGreatsword (wanted to see how the transmog actually looked on a character) and for some reason we had a little chat; he specified that up to know he has changed up to 6 Guilds in total and currently is 2/10 Mythic; he also stated that the reason he has been moving allot had nothing to do about his dissatisfaction in every Guild thus far but due to the fact that they were disbanding constantly after a few raid weeks.
.

not surprising at all - if you are not hardcore guild you wont be doin mythic with how game is tuned atm - and if you are casual player you have nothign to gain from raiding with guild as you can achieve everything much faster with lfg tool.

[Misaligned]

I'm sure I'm in the minority and of and older school of thought, but I preferred when there was just raiding, not multiple difficulty tiers. You either could raid and kill bosses, or you couldn't. I understand all the reasons they changed this approach. This is just my preference.

[Polarthief]

It happened in the end of cataclysm in the g auto invite gold rush -not to this staggering extreme level- but still it happens.

Of course it's always "happened", but this is quite a difference. Mythic, lack of content, patches like Selfie shit, 6.2 giving us almost nothing to look forward to; I mean, what else does a fairly burnt out player do? Not to mention having FOUR difficulties on SEPARATE lockouts doesn't help. Flex was at least intended to be pointless to players doing Normal+; Normal in WoD was intended to be Flex, but they lied and made it part of the actual progression curve, so now you have 3 fucking difficulties to go through, and clearly, people aren't fans of that.

[PaladinJ]

I feel that another large part of it is that we had a giant spike in 10 man guilds during Cataclysm when they allowed 10's and 25's to have the same level of reward. Fast forward to today where in order to complete the most difficult part of the game you're required to have 20 people. Huge amounts of recruitment in the days leading up to WoD, huge levels of stress for leadership of guilds trying to find competent players to fill slots that suddenly popped up out of no where leads to burnout. I've personally been in 4 guilds since WoD launched, and every single one collapsed due to leadership being burned out. Officers don't want to have to continually recruit to fill 20 slots in order to kill Mythics, and on the flipside, they push themselves to do it rather than give up their little kingdoms and join another guild in a similar situation. Guilds take mediocre or inexperienced at end game players to fill the slots, who don't really want to put in the time commitment like in past expansions, just to be able to raid. They inevitably quit or miss raids or take breaks which causes more strain on the leadership and we have a ton of guilds recruiting for the same positions with a limited player pool. There aren't enough hardcore raiders left to turn the hardcore 10 man guilds (that were created when 25 mans were killed off during Cataclysm) into 20 man raid teams. Plus lets not forget that sub numbers dropped by 3 million since WoD launched. I'm sure at least a few of those are what caused a few guilds to fall apart.

So you see massive amounts of disbanding. Couple this with the general consensus that this game has become boring and garrison-centric...and voila.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Fuck the WoD.

Sums it up nice and neat I would have to say.

[Gadzooks]

I also think the difficulty of some of the BRF fights may have something to do with it, especially heroic Blackhand for the more casual-esque guilds. My guild lost 2 main raiders and was on the verge of a complete disband due to high tensions after weeks of working blackhand, luckily we got the kill and every thing worked out. The same thing is starting to happen as we are now 2/10 mythic and working on gruul, people just don't feel like beating their head against a new boss for several more weeks. It just seems like the motivation to get the bosses down has been dwindling this expac.

How times have changed. I guess the raider mindset has shifted tremendously - back when I raided, we went into a new raid expecting months of beating our heads against bosses to get through it eventually - farm mode took months, literally. I'm not mocking, it's just surprising that even the raid community now expects to be done with everything with one or two weeks of trying - from my old school point of view, a few weeks on Mythic Blackhand? That's just getting started, and settled in.

Anyway, I think overall the game is losing interest, for a lot of reasons - the only success Blizzard has had this time around is letting pretty much every aspect of the game down - PVP is miserable, casuals have already fled in droves, and now the raiders are leaving. Motivation is down across the board. There's no "Holy shit, gotta have that" rewards, like the glaives, or Arthas' mount. Just the same old stuff, rehashed and recolored, nothing really exciting or interesting or fun.

I think we might find out what the hardcore, "Won't quit no matter what" numbers are. The Mediocre Warlords Of Dreanor is in a bad place, and 6.2...yeah, probably not going to help much. If guilds fall apart on two or three weeks of Mythic Blackhand, HFC is going to nuke the guild field, and sow it with salt. Some of the fights are honestly fucking hard, and are going to rip guilds apart anyway. Killing Archimonde might actually mean something...if there's anyone left who cares.

[Deleted]

It doesn't help the expansion is outright terrible in the overall scheme of things.

[Zf]

How times have changed. I guess the raider mindset has shifted tremendously - back when I raided, we went into a new raid expecting months of beating our heads against bosses to get through it eventually - farm mode took months, literally. I'm not mocking, it's just surprising that even the raid community now expects to be done with everything with one or two weeks of trying - from my old school point of view, a few weeks on Mythic Blackhand? That's just getting started, and settled in.

Anyway, I think overall the game is losing interest, for a lot of reasons - the only success Blizzard has had this time around is letting pretty much every aspect of the game down - PVP is miserable, casuals have already fled in droves, and now the raiders are leaving. Motivation is down across the board. There's no "Holy shit, gotta have that" rewards, like the glaives, or Arthas' mount. Just the same old stuff, rehashed and recolored, nothing really exciting or interesting or fun.

I think we might find out what the hardcore, "Won't quit no matter what" numbers are. The Mediocre Warlords Of Dreanor is in a bad place, and 6.2...yeah, probably not going to help much. If guilds fall apart on two or three weeks of Mythic Blackhand, HFC is going to nuke the guild field, and sow it with salt. Some of the fights are honestly fucking hard, and are going to rip guilds apart anyway. Killing Archimonde might actually mean something...if there's anyone left who cares.

Oh don't get me wrong, I was a raider in late BC working our way through BT. I also raided semi hardcore all through Wrath and I remember spending a good amount of time working on 25 H LK. It just seems these days people (including myself) are having a hard time finding the motivation to do some of the harder bosses.

[Deleted]

What was the most successful formula of Raiding pre-WoD? I was watching the other night a video and he was stating that he would prefer like it was in another expansion where you had 1-2 big-ass raid environment with many bosses and it would scale up from one wing to the next or something like that, but honestly I am clueless as it gets; I am a WoD new player.

[Deleted]

How times have changed. I guess the raider mindset has shifted tremendously - back when I raided, we went into a new raid expecting months of beating our heads against bosses to get through it eventually

That's right. The so called raiders these days have such entitlement issues. They wouldn't have lasted a week back in the good old days.

[Kaldreno]

allot: give or apportion (something) to someone as a share or task.
a lot: many