TDH Part 7: Early Raiding

As we last left the story, TDH was just beginning to raid regularly with the two other guilds Poison Arrow and Deadbanger’s Ball. (“Raiding” involves game content that is difficult enough to require 40 (in those days) players) Molten Core was the holy grail of raiding at this point, and daring to set foot in it was audacious in a way that probably can’t be explained unless you were there. In terms of how raiding effects a guild, I had an opportunity to learn directly from PA’s leadership, which was obviously quite experienced in guild management. I want to talk here first about what the raids were like, and then on the effects that the three-way guild alliance had on the participating guilds.

To raid in these early days of WOW, you needed first to get 40 people together and coordinated at the correct time. Some guilds form around the idea of raiding exclusively. These guilds have stringent regulations, but mainly, they self-select for people who want to raid. If you get these sorts of people together it doesn’t really matter what your attendance requirements are per se, because the crowd has self-selected. In any event, we had some significant difficulty rounding up the requisite number of players. Just look at the basic question: If you played WOW and wanted to raid why on earth would you join a rag tag band of people doing it for the first time instead of an established guild that could provide quick rewards? Since individual skill had little to no bearing on raid results, with group experience IMHO being the decisive factor, successful & proven groups drew the recruits.

Poison Arrow started the guild alliance in order to begin working on Molten Core. They didn’t have enough players at the start, so the alliance was a necessity for them (and for us). We had about 5-8 regular Two Dollar Horde players show up for the Thursday night raids, with the bulk provided by PA and another 10 or so from DB. The early raids were grueling experiences. My own perspective was that you would spend hours just waiting around, only to die because someone else didn’t understand what they were supposed to be doing. I found it grueling, unpleasant and unrewarding from a loot perspective.

Poison Arrow had an interesting approach to minimizing the sort of drama that until this point had been rife in TDH. They had one guild officer, Rapscallion, who’s role was to basically be a complete hard ass. This was an example of what I had already been learning – a successful organization has got to rigorously enforce its rules. A person who’s not afraid to do that is invaluable. PA was also very strict about not allowing its members to raid with other guilds, thus crafting a sense of cohesion. PA was a living example of many of the lessons I’d been picking up in guild management.

PA, the strongest guild organizationally speaking of the three, began to attract players from the other two guilds. Indeed, I think it may have been part of PA’s leadership plan to siphon off players from the alliance guilds. This has been my constant experience with guild alliances – players will flow towards the guild that better serves their interest. Most of the time that interest is the ready availability of in game loot, though the defectors most often don’t perceive that themselves. That’s another story that I’ll get to later.

Deadbanger’s Ball suffered the most from this steady attrition of players to PA, indeed the guild was largely destroyed as a result. How TDH managed to survive, is not completely clear. I think the people who stayed at that point were largely a result of my own personal network from PvP games – hence TDH players tended to be a little more boisterous and a little more competitive than PA players. Two key events were taking place at about this time that I think helped make TDH endure: one, I had started leading competitive teams of “Alterac Valley” games, and hence had a strong in game personal network of players from that. And two, the appearance of a new 20 man raiding instance, Zul Gurub, gave us an opportunity to start raiding for ourselves without PA.

By the time the “guild alliance” fell apart TDH was strong enough to survive. More on that next time, where I’ll talk some about the Alterac Valley teams.