Yesterday was our second raid night for Walk the Plank. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on talking about every raid we will have in the future but I think it’s interesting to talk about the first few ones so I can look back and see how we started out. The plan was for us to raid ToC10 to round out the gear of two of our members. I did not want to do two nights of ICC this week since I didn’t want to push progression in ICC with a raid made up of 50% pugs. so we headed in ToC with 5 pugs and high hopes of clearing the place and scoring some loot.
What followed was a disaster of epic proportions I still have trouble to describe. It was like watching a train wreck that never ended, horrible to behold but you can’t look away. I had gearchecked every pug before inviting them and they all were ICC level geared players. All of them. Yet, our highest dps was our two guildies that we brought specially to gear them up. I still don’t understand how someone geared in iLevel 251 items and up can only do 2k dps in ToC. I still do not understand how that’s possible. I pulled the plug after the second wipe, trusting my gut instinct that ToC10 would be a horrible experience if we pushed it and not wishing to subject my guildies to that. Still, we did pug a few more people to do the weekly(Sartharion) and even ended up going to Molten Core for giggles so not all was lost.
If anything, the past few raids we had have made it crystal clear that we need to recruit more people as soon as possible. Raiding when half the raid is made up of pugs is literally playing russian roulette. I can get lucky like last sunday, get a good group and blow through content or I can get what I had yesterday and failed miserably without even having a chance. I have absolutely no control over whether we succeed or not and that is unacceptable for me.
Current recruitment philosophy
Right now our plan was recruiting was through the boards, forums and the pugs. We didn’t want to spam trade chat simply because we feared the quality of recruits we’d get through there. I don’t want to have to gear up a ton of new people and I don’t want to have to teach the server how to play, something that seems to happen all too frequently when you recruit through trade.
But even if our idea sounds good in practice it’s not working very well for us right now. Most good players we met in pugs are already in good guilds and it’s hard for us to get noticed on the server forums. To most people it must look like yet another wannabe raiding guild and I can’t say I blame them. We don’t exactly have a lot to go on to entice new people to come to us.
Also, I was reminded by my room-mate that recruiting inside pugs works well when you only have one or two people to recruit but when it’s five people it’s not the same. As he astutely pointed out, pug recruitment only worked twice back in BC and then we only had to recruit a single person each time. Overall, the PuG recruitment technique doesn’t look like it’s a good idea anymore.
Solution?
My problem is well-defined. I need to recruit at least three more people in the very short-term so we are not at the mercy of Pugs.
It’s obvious that our current recruiting technique will not net me those three people in the short-term. I might get incredibly lucky but I won’t be counting on that.
The solution? This is where I’m having trouble. One part of me tells me to be patient and just give it some more time. However I really don’t like waiting around for something that may never come. My experience tells me that the longer we take to get it fixed the worst it will hurt us.
The first and obvious solution would be to start recruiting on the trade channel. I may have less control on quality but at least we’d get the bodies needed. I can also get lucky and get quality recruits too. Someone suggested that we put in criteria on gear to filter out slackers and so we wouldn’t have to gear up a ton of people. It’s definitively something that I see could work solving my immediate problem wich is bodies but I don’t know how that would play out long-term.
In fact it’s the only solution I can think of right now and it’s not one I especially like. If any of you reading this have more to suggest I’d be more than happy to hear you out!
Would it help if you recruited through trade and what-not, but required them to go to your website and fill out an application? It’s my experience, anyway, that by making people take the time to fill out an application, you filter between the people who are new to raiding and honestly want to learn, and those who just want phat lewtz and immediate gratification. The application doesn’t even have to be that complex, but by making them wait an hour to a day before starting to cause drama, it tends to discourage those drama-kings and -queens.
Hi Jennifer!!
Indeed, sending them to our boards after talking to them would be a good compromise. Like you said it could filter out a lot of bad apples right there. I will definitively be mulling that over.
You could direct them to the website. I see many guilds that do that. It’s a bit different than just spamming and accepting anyone.
I think it would get a few people in. Also post up a reply on the guild post on the server forums. Ya know, so it doesn’t look so dead
Are you making your own pugs of VoA on 10 and 25 each week? You’ll run into more pvp’ers than pve’ers, but it does give you contact with folks on your server, and a bit of an idea of who’s a huge asshole, who stands in fire, who can be counted on to switch targets to orbs, who wants a summon when their ass is sitting in Dalaran two feet from the portal…
Hmm… that’s not a bad idea, Nina. Also, it didn’t occur to me to mention this since it’s clear that you’re looking to recruit a full-time ship’s crew, but one tactic that is often used by groups who regularly PUG content is to create your own channel. Maybe it would be “Plankfriends” or something. Just make sure everyone in the guild /joins that channel and then when you run with someone who you think you like, but who isn’t willing to join your guild right then, or who you aren’t sure if they are quite what you are looking for, you can ask them to join the channel. It’s a good way to keep close contact with the GOOD puggers that you come across. Some of them might end up in your guild roster eventually. Others might just end up being the handful of good non-guildies that you can pull from if you find yourself a couple raiders short of an ICC attempt.
Let me point out that this channel benefits the PUGers who might be considering joining your guild, too. As a raider who spent quite some time looking for a home for my main, I often ran PUGs with a guild that I enjoyed, but I was not comfortable jumping into a guild after one raid, or maybe they didn’t realize that I might have been interested in recruitment. Instead, it was kind of a “passing of two ships on the open ocean” sort of thing. I would tell them to just let me know if they ever wanted me to raid with them again, but I knew that even so, I’d probably never see them again. But those guilds who had a specific channel for me to join? It allowed me to stay connected with them and they with me. It gave one chance PUG the chance to have a much longer-lasting ramifications. So, yeah… having a channel for your guild-friends isn’t just a tool for you to use, it’s also something that I, as one of those PUGers, would have really appreciated.
really love that idea