Raiding Alliance

[Kevin]

Just posting to stress how important this is. Tufty hits the nail right on the head - the community is whatll make raiding together worthwhile, not the other way around.

-Z

Oddly I was happier with alliances where they raided together but didn't try to be some uber guild. It was easier to raid with someone I didn't really care for than to do 5 mans with them or have to listen to them in guild chat.

I think things with Keepers (pre-TBC) and with NoS and later NS (before they imploded and several of them merged with us) worked better than Avarice did on Stormrage. I could deal with people to raid with them for a few hours that I didn't care to much about, knowing that the people in my guild that I did more interaction with I got along with very well. The people in the alliances that I liked more I'd do more with, but I didn't have to worry about some chat channel being filled with people I only considered associates at best. I often think AA would have worked better without GEM.

I know I'm not on the same page as everyone else there. But raiding is not the most important thing in game for me. It's just a means to an end, so not fully liking or getting along with other raiders mattered a lot less to me when and when they were gone and I didn't have to deal with them after the raid was over I was happier. :)



Edit: To add to how those other alliances worked.....

With Keepers, they organized and ran the raids. We abided by their rules but they listened to our input a lot and I even lead a few of the raids. They did the work, so they made the rules and that was fine. They pretty much treated us like we were in their guild. Dedicated raiders got slots and that was how it worked. For most of the Lurkers and Keepers this worked very well. In TBC they had enough to field 25 mans on their own, and we wanted more control to be able to more easily work in less play time raiders who had problems getting into Keepers run in vanilla, so we didn't bother to continue to pursue an alliance. But we are still on good relations with Keepers.

In TBC we ran the raids but had trouble filling all the slots for a 25 man with just our guild, so we partnered with NoS who was filling Kara raids but not much else. So they got 8 raid slots, we got 17. Each guild filled the slots however they saw fit. If we couldn't fill 17 they got extra, if they couldn't fill 8 that week, we back filled from Lurkers. It worked pretty well but there was a mis communication and they thought we wanted to break off the alliance so they started to just openly recruit. No hard feelings on either side.

After that ended we did the same type of deal with NS who was barely filling Kara raids. That worked very well until the NS guild had some internal issues (not related to raids with us) and broke up. We absorbed several of their members and were then large enough to field 25 mans on our own so we just left it at that. Of course real life took members away and we struggled to field full raids. When we learned that progression through content could be done with just 10 mans we decided that was the focus for wrath as many of us prefer the smaller content anyway.

We now tend to field 2 10 man raid locks a week and occasionally underman some 25 man stuff and have a lot of fun.

But all 3 of those alliances when they were running were soooo much more fun for me than what we had with AA. I had issues with raiders from other guilds but we just talked with their officers and they dealt with it. If one of the Lurkers was an issue their officers let us know and we dealt with it. We didn't in guild drama and there wasn't much in raid drama. I just liked it better. We were seperate guilds and we wanted to stay that way so we did. Stormrage the guilds lost too much of their individual identities it felt like to me.