The great player. This guy makes every raid and is the best in his position. He gets geared quickly. He’s got two choices. He can farm while everyone else gears up or he can start rolling an Alt. He’s got his loot… so he becomes bored.

The not so great player. This guy is finding it tough to compete in his group. Just can’t hang with the big dogs and is looking for a change so expectations won’t be as great.

In either case the answer is usually no. Main switching causes a lot of problems for guild leaders. We are currently thinking of having people re-app to the guild if they want to switch. It can be that bad…

Not very fair and a good source of friction.

@Vixsin: Yes, I would argue that itt was a case of bad decisions. You can award the best healer on the server as long as they’re consistent in showing up and have no future plans to shift position. You can recognize “career” players pretty well. For instance, players that only have one main and have played since vanilla are the ones you want to watch for as it’s unlikely they’ll switch.

Another example: If you have a player in the guild that’s serving in the forces and might get called up on deployments, it might not be a good idea to award frags to him. Yes he’s a good guy, and yes he’s a great healer, but the point is he might not be here to put those fragments to use.

In your case, the decision it sends is that a poor choice was made in awarding fragments. It’s up to your leaders to decide whether to retain a player or let them walk. There are plenty of skilled players out there. It’s just going to take some time to filter out those who flake out from those who won’t. But this would have led to another topic entirely on either letting the guy walk versus looking for a replacement healer. It’s a question of keeping a player who is familiar with us and our system versus pulling in a new recruit who we know little about and who may not gel in the system.

And that’s a tough choice to make. You gotta think about cost/benefit.

I’m a nut when it comes to leading guilds but I’ve always gone for the communist, equality approach over who has the best gear and needs the best stuff. So I always tended to just let anyone sign up based on a first-come, first-served basis or something like that. Made raiding a pain in the arse but the point is to have fun right?
.-= We Fly Spitfires´s last blog ..“You’re in Our World Now”: How Much Does Setting Affect MMO Enjoyment? =-.

You have Barry coming into tank, he’s needed and a valuable member now but lets say Barry and the other OT both need a piece of gear, would him being a switched main be able to be used as a factor. He already had gear spent on him, which is now relatively useless to the guild while the other OT was not a main swap and has been useful to the guild in the time Barry has been away.

Would the size of the upgrade come into play(Barry is obviously not in the previous tier BiS) or would the other OT attendence and role consistancy play a larger role(lets say the item is one he’s been after for a long while, rare drop)?

Example: In a previous guild, we had a key healer switch mains during the middle of Ulduar hardmode progression, from a holy pally to a disc priest because he “didn’t like healing on his pally anymore.” While this would seem to be a 1-for-1 trade, since they were equally geared and both filled similar healing roles (thus fulfilling req’s 1-3), the one main distinction was that his pally already had been awarded our first 10 fragments.

Was this a case of a series of bad decisions (the first of which was awarding the flakey pally the fragments in the first place), or simply one based on the belief that this guy was one of the best healers on the server (which IMO, he was) and should be retained under any circumstances? Further, what sort of message did that decision send to the rest of the team?