Raids are generally tense situations and people need relief valves for that tension. You have to balance the focus on the raid with the reality that raiding is stressful; if you don’t allow any relief from it while its happening you are creating a powder keg waiting to go off imo.

Now if you are just refering to /1 general chat not say chat in general then I can totally agree.

I have to agree with Syd about scheduled AFKs. The charter (raid group) I run with does the same thing and it really makes it run smoother for us at the end of the day.

I found all your other regs reasonable and interesting (those I hadn’t seen/considered before) but as a mature player who is helpful on gen chat and likes to be silly sometimes, and bond with others on the realm in those public chats, I’d be insulted with that requirement. I found a similar req regarding the realm wow forums *after* joining a raid guild, and quickly lost any enthusiasm for that raid guild.

But good luck all the same on your raids!

I’d say that there is no better way to deal with the rising issues than using your common sense. You can only describe the most relevant -and most annoying- issues in the policies and amend them later if need arises. The policies are to be changed, like the charter, when there is need to do so.

Copra

Copras last blog post..Holy BG!

Further to that, since you are a new guild without the ability to subsidize anything, don’t promise to subsidize enchants. IMO, enchants are something that players should be getting to make themselves the best they can be. You don’t want to hear the argument of “I didn’t get my enchant because no one was on to give me mats from guild bank.” Collect everything that drops and start getting into the habit of selling/DE-ing it and then after a while you can see if it’s feasible to subsidize enchants or if it becomes more feasible to subsidize guild repairs.

Mind you, my guild that I’m using for example, has been FFA loot by officers only since I joined 2+ years ago (and the guild is 3.5 years old) with our guild bank getting all the profits and we only just had raid repairs subsidized (50g per raid) when we were in Sunwell and progressing (tanks were subsidized earlier due to their much higher repair costs) because we didn’t want to promise anything and then not be able to follow through.

Regarding AFKs:
Our guild has the policy that we notify the raid leader that we need to go AFK and he would then organize who could go and when to make sure that the raid had adequate dps/healers/tanks. Personally, I think that it would just be better if people knew that at such-and-such time we were breaking for x minutes. However, I think either way you do it, you will end up with people who say they’ll be gone for only 2 minutes but won’t come back for 5-10 and you’ll have the same thing happen if you have scheduled breaks; it just depends on which you prefer to manage.

You don’t mention your loot system here. I don’t recall if you’ve posted about it already, or if you haven’t set one up yet, but this would be the place to put it.

The first guild I was in I learned everything about discipline. Officer worked with -dkp a lot. Chatter in teamspeak was kept on a minimum. Not being on time was a crime. We then wiped on Archimonde for a whole month and the guild broke up over it.

With the guild I’m in right now I got to kill Illidan pre 3.0.2 but the overall feeling during raid is much much more casual (which annoyed me in the beginning). There’s a lot of chatter, there’s too much afk going and too many ppl show up too late. BUT clearing trash is insanely fast and most guildies learn boss encounters quick.

I agree with all points in the original post, just wanted to mention how guild dynamics sometimes work.

drugs last blog post..OMG…Baby Polar Bear!

Also, about the subbing policy, if you need to sub people in/out of the raid, do you do it during the trash leading up to the boss, or on the boss itself? Also, after the boss is dead, does the new group stay in, do you sub back to the original group, or does the raid leader make that call based on the next boss? Likewise, how will subbing work? Will any eventual mage that you’re bound to get port them to Dalaran where they’ll fly back to the instance, or do they just run all the way back out while the incoming players sit around outside waiting? How much notice will sub-in players get that they’re coming up so they can be outside the instance ready, or will they just have to be waiting outside for the entire raid?