We never wanted to be progression oriented anyways as a guild. So those that couldn’t deal with the slowness finally left, but it was hard for me and others to allow that – even with all the reconciliation attempts we tried between the two groups. After that, it was much better. I think in the end, each person has to decide where they belong, and what they want to get into. We didn’t care as much about progression (as a guild), though one or two of us wanted that. The couple of people really concerned about that started their own raid group and were happy to sub in alts for the casual group when needed, so it worked out.

It was a pretty wretched decision, me quitting hurt a lot of people, there’s not a lot to heal (my favorite role) doing solo play, and I don’t know how long pet battles are going to entertain me. I simply couldn’t bear the idea of doing Garalon Normal with some of the people in my raid :-(

Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time – who am I? Mostly good and friendly, and one who tries. Sometimes that just has to be enough.

Expectations and culture across our three groups differ greatly. I raid in our progression group, and we have a very low tolerance for “slow” or “stupid” people – but that’s expected. Our entire group is like that – we expect you to catch on quickly, and we all play at somewhat of a higher level. We do have one or two people who learn slightly slower, but as much as we sometimes despair about them, for us there’s a healthy balance of elite performance AND friendship/attitude. What I’m trying to say is even though sometimes our “slower” raiders cause us a few extra wipes and we despair over them learning at the brisk pace our RL sets, they still learn quickly enough that we enjoy playing together. If that were not the case, we would have to cut them and find new raiders. Ultimately though, the ten of us thrive on the pressure and stress, and we work well together because of it.

Right now we’re at some wonderfully magical place where eight of us have been raiding together for over a year, and our two newer members are such a perfect fit playstyle and attitude wise, and it’s happy and we’re just pwning. Historically this has not always been the case, and if someone is not performing as well as we expect, we let them know what we feel the issue is, we go over logs to determine where they’re struggling, and we try to work the situation out (and I say “we” because generally 3 of us counsel them – myself as GM, the RL, and either their partner healer, tank, or another dps, depending on what role they perform). But the fact of the matter is that progression is SO fast-paced that if someone is definitely hindering the group, they’ve got to be cut, and quickly – and we try to handle that as professionally as possible (‘You’re a great person and we enjoy having you in the guild, but we feel you are not quite a good fit for this group because of x and x reason, so we need to let you go. You’re welcome to stay and try for a spot in one of our other groups, or we understand if you can find a better home elsewhere. We appreciate the time you’ve given us.’)

Speaking of which, if I had to raid with one of our other raid groups (which I did occasionally in Cata on an alt, on our off night when they needed a sub), I would go crazy. They lack the same kind of pressure and stress that I enjoy, and feel TOO casual to me. I get aggravated at slow performance and lower numbers, and on the other hand THEY get aggravated with my attitude and frustration. I can’t emphasize enough that the way they play is NOT wrong, just that I am not a good fit for that type of group and they are not a good fit for my type of group. WoW caters to a wide variety of players and playstyles, and there should be homes for all of them. I don’t view myself as snobby because I know I can outperform others in my guild, and I LOVE being in the same guild with them… we’re all friends, we all hang out in vent, we’ll run dungeons together and LFR together and so forth. Because that group is more casual, they have far more tolerance for slow learners, and they do much more mediation. Pretty much if you have a good personality and get along well, they work with you and take more time. My group expects you to know what you’re doing, theirs expects to teach you how to be a better raider.

What I’m trying to say is that your raid group should have expectations in place that they should communicate clearly with raiders. How fast are you expected to learn? What type of help is there for those who actively seek it? Playing with real life friends and family members can get really sticky, but in the end you should be able to discuss what your raiding expectations are and if they don’t mesh, maybe you don’t need to be raiding together. My best friend IRL is an officer in my guild, and I love questing with her and doing old content with her and talking and running the guild together, but if I raided with her I would commit murder. I am far too hardcore for her and she is far too lax for me, so we raid separately – and it’s okay to do that!

As we started progressing through heroics, I started to notice a few things. In the group there was quickly forming two tiers of raiders. About half of the raiders, including me, were really interested in the game, the mechanics, and min-maxing their characters and hammering out their rotations to be the best they could be. The other half did not care as much and had spotty attendance on raid nights, sub-par DPS for the group as a whole, and was making progression harder for the group.

This all blew up after the second week of wiping to Ultraxion at <2% health. Some of the officers complained, if only our warlock, or only our shaman could up their DPS by 1-2k we would be golden, if only they could read through and take note of the guides on Elitist Jerks he would be dead, if only the paladin did not screw up his Hour of Twilight for the *fifth* wipe that night we would finally be able to progress on to other heroics. If only. If only. If only.

This was incredibly frustrating. Yet at the end of the day, I found that I was happy raiding with these people. I really liked our warlock as a person; I laughed and joked with our shaman all the time; and even through I ended up muting our paladin on vent, he was a good guy. The fact that they were not as interested in the game was a fine cost to pay to have the pleasure of raiding with the group as a whole.

It turns out that the officers of the guild disagreed with me. This division between the guild sparked drama that ended up fracturing the guild in half. The more hard-core raiders switched servers, some quit the game, and all burned bridges. I was left holding the smoldering remnants of a formerly solid raiding guild. It sucked. A month later the guild leader hung up her hat and put a halt to raiding until Mists of Pandaria. She found a raiding home for some of the guild members still interested in raiding. I took some time off from the game and worked through some personal issues.

Looking back on it, a few more hours of wiping on a boss for each encounter was frustrating, yet that was a price highly worth playing for the enjoyment of being part of a fun, helpful guild of new-found friends. Sometimes people will not have time, or do not care enough to read strategies. Sometimes guildies (my Big-Bear-Tanking-Butt included) will make mistakes. Repeatedly. Sometimes no amount of coaching or cajoling will get them to improve.

In my opinion the best approach is clear. Do what we druid's do best: grin and bear it!

As for what do you do… I’ve been with raid teams where there were some people who were clearly struggling but still trying their hardest and asking for help. I’ve spent week after week raiding with them with no new boss kills but I don’t regret it the least because they were friends and the experience helped them (and me, when you’re carrying someone, you need to work harder and improve your own game – so the help goes both ways).

That said, I had the displeasure of raiding with someone who was weak but instead of trying to get better (and sitting out on progression if she couldn’t handle a fight), her response was to blame tanks or healers and start a blame spiral. She used her position as a guild leader to stay on the raid team – standing in bad, ignoring mechanics, doing less dps than a tank as an arcane mage on single target fights (Yor’sajh in DS). She never took responsibility and would just berate the entire raid for not doing enough dps (the top two dps were doing nearly 2x of what she was) led to so many people burning out and quitting the raid team and guild. Any advice or criticism, even in /w was enough to cause her to become vindictive.

I’m in a guild with a much cooler GL now, one who is an incredibly good healer and DPS yet is very nice to people trying to learn and whom she tries to help as much as possible.

Anyway, my rambling point is, today I prefer to raid/rated pvp with friends of equal skill. I don’t like to run with people who are far better than me (i.e. working on heroic content when I’ve not cleared normal) as I feel I’m holding them back even when doing my best, nor do I want to raid/rated pvp with people who are very new/not skilled as I feel it places unreasonable demands on them.

So what do I do? I fill in for raid teams in my guild when they’re short a healer/tank/dps. Or usually, I pug. Believe it or not, on my server, its pretty easy to find middle-of-the-road pugs who’ll down 3 bosses in HoF10m or do a full clear of MV10m. This way if I run into a group which is very weak, its just a few hours and not weeks upon weeks of playtime down the drain.

In ICC10, we had one player who just couldn’t get the timing for the run out after you got sucked in to Sindragosa. It was tight for us all because we were in Australia so everyone had a 400-500ms ping (which makes most fights more difficult). After a few wipes and a lot of embarrassed silence in vent, I suggested to her (a resto druid) that she try cat form sprinting out. She quit the raid and the raid team on the spot. I think that was a bit over the top, but she had a lot of things going on in real life that were stressing her out too. So that didn’t go so well.

Now, I am a 25s healing lead and have some of my healers that just can’t get certain mechanics. I try to organize things so that it minimizes our reliance on them executing the mechanic – for example, I have one person who just can’t run tornadoes on Blade-Lord Ta’yak, so he doesn’t do the run at all – he stays at the end, heals up the people as they’re leaving and heals them again when they’re coming back in, which is actually pretty helpful. That’s a mechanics where we can do that though. Other mechanics are not so optional – and then I have done things like ask people to practice in LFR, and other guildies have made explanatory videos to help people learn.

One of the things I learned from my Sindragosa experience was to never let it get to the embarrassed silence phase. If I think someone is struggling with a mechanic, I ask them what they’re struggling with and try to pull other people to help them where I can – and I tell them not to give up and that I know that they can get it. A lot of the time I find that people give up too easily and say “I can’t do this”, so helping them avoid that is useful. I have never benched someone for not being able to handle a mechanic – we have always worked through it.

That said – like other people have mentioned, it does sound like your issue on Stone Guards was a mental overload issue. Sometimes people have bad nights and you just can’t handle your normal load.

I guess there are expectations, and if the expectation is for the raid team to blaze through new content first week out – but execution doesn’t merit it – then you, like BBB did, need to shift focus and expectation.

I guess it also depends on how long the guild has been raiding together – a newly formed guild comprised of groups of friends and cemented with /trade seekers will work on progression issues differently than a guild that’s been raiding since Vanilla and knows everyones quirks.

“There are stupid people in the world, and I often suspect I’m one of ‘em. And we’re in your game, standing in poo.

You made the great distinction of stupid and ignorant. I wish I could have thought of that. Maybe you’re not as stupid as you think you are.

What do you do?”

Nothing much these days. Used to get under my skin, alot, alot, alot.

These days, in an uber casual guild that is a mix of not so skilled gamers (reflexes, co-ordination, etc) and the complete clueless non gamer types, like a level 87 warlock girl with an 185ish ilvl trinket. (Because the icon looks way cooler that the others!)

When we queue heroics together (which I no longer need except the daily 80 valor) I casually get up to 85k DPS. A second guildie DPS can maybe top 40k, the rest is usually far behind.

My brother used to be in the same guild, he can outperform me easy. He couldn’t take it anymore, dealing with fellow gamers in WOW unable to do the basic things. He’s now in a progression raid doing the real thing.

Me, I like running around with the clueless warlock girl. The things she does, or doesn’t, no epics in the world could replace that. So you go ahead and be your stupid self :-) (No harm intended)