Raiding Alliance

[Sheep]

After an extremely frustrating weekend in a Naxx 25 PuG, I want some accountability from raiders while getting my Emblems of Valor. The problem is that my guild is too small, and can only muster sufficient players for 10 man runs.

Long story short, I'm on good terms with two guild leaders who have a similar number of raiders, and I'd like to propose a raiding alliance. I remember reading that some members of the Lounge were part of one, Avarice Alliance. I was wondering how that works, logistically. Is there a communal message board? What mods are used to coordinate across guilds? How do you decide who gets to come to raids?

I've thought up some guidelines already, and was wondering if they were any good:

-The Heroic runs are not learning runs. If you have not been in every encounter in 10-man, please do so with your guild before signing up.
-The Heroic runs are not free-passes for gear. If you're not pulling your weight due to insufficient gear, please run some Heroics and Normal raids before signing up.

I haven't thought about whether we should use a loot system, or just fair roll, main before off. Ep/Gp sounds pretty good, though.

Any input is welcome, please share your thoughts!

[Lissa]

After an extremely frustrating weekend in a Naxx 25 PuG, I want some accountability from raiders while getting my Emblems of Valor. The problem is that my guild is too small, and can only muster sufficient players for 10 man runs.

Long story short, I'm on good terms with two guild leaders who have a similar number of raiders, and I'd like to propose a raiding alliance. I remember reading that some members of the Lounge were part of one, Avarice Alliance. I was wondering how that works, logistically. Is there a communal message board? What mods are used to coordinate across guilds? How do you decide who gets to come to raids?

I've thought up some guidelines already, and was wondering if they were any good:

-The Heroic runs are not learning runs. If you have not been in every encounter in 10-man, please do so with your guild before signing up.
-The Heroic runs are not free-passes for gear. If you're not pulling your weight due to insufficient gear, please run some Heroics and Normal raids before signing up.

I haven't thought about whether we should use a loot system, or just fair roll, main before off. Ep/Gp sounds pretty good, though.

Any input is welcome, please share your thoughts!

There are boards that Avarice uses at Avaricealliance.net. I'm not sure how much you'll get out of the boards that guests have access too as there are member boards as well that have a variety of things going on between scheduling runs, strategies, general BS, item needs of people, class discussions, profession discussions, and the like.

There is a lot of things that go on in a raiding alliance and it takes a lot of work to hold together, more so than what you would see in a raiding guild itself. There's also a ton of dynamics that go on behind the seens that most people would be privy too as well.

[WimpySmurf]

The Terenas crew is using Wowraidar at the moment for doing organizing raids. We use a special account to create the raids and promote folks into the raids and that accounts password is known by all the raid leaders.

Our loot mod uses officer notes to keep track of data, so that doesn't really work well for an alliance.

-WimpySmurf

[Taelas]

Raid groups (or alliances) simply work as a raid guild would. On my home server, most raids are raid groups rather than guilds.

There's usually a message board and some sort of loot system page. In-game, you join a chat channel and use it as I presume a raid guild would.

You can use the in-game calender to schedule events and set-up invitations. I haven't looked into it much, though.

[Tal]

After an extremely frustrating weekend in a Naxx 25 PuG, I want some accountability from raiders while getting my Emblems of Valor. The problem is that my guild is too small, and can only muster sufficient players for 10 man runs.

Long story short, I'm on good terms with two guild leaders who have a similar number of raiders, and I'd like to propose a raiding alliance. I remember reading that some members of the Lounge were part of one, Avarice Alliance. I was wondering how that works, logistically. Is there a communal message board? What mods are used to coordinate across guilds? How do you decide who gets to come to raids?

I've thought up some guidelines already, and was wondering if they were any good:

-The Heroic runs are not learning runs. If you have not been in every encounter in 10-man, please do so with your guild before signing up.
-The Heroic runs are not free-passes for gear. If you're not pulling your weight due to insufficient gear, please run some Heroics and Normal raids before signing up.

I haven't thought about whether we should use a loot system, or just fair roll, main before off. Ep/Gp sounds pretty good, though.

Any input is welcome, please share your thoughts!

We do use a communal board with a raid calendar thanks to the generosity of a former Lurker. In game we make use of the mod Guild Event Manager to communicate in a shared channel. For raids we utilize raidleaders (volunteers) and class leads to make roster choices. There is generally a minimum gear check and after awhile, a minimum skill check for rostering.

We use a modify loot system wherein players earn points and can bid need, offspec, sidegrade and toy. Need is based off your role (eg I am a tank I collect tank gear), offspec is a secondary role (dps gear for me) and sidegrade covers those things that I would take but are only used situationally (items with +block for trash) and toy is a setting for things you would like to have but wouldn't use in a raid or just want to collect. Need is full points (we set point values based on items), offspec is a percentage and sidegrade and toy are lesser.

[Tuftears]

The most important thing to get right is the feeling that it's an alliance, work on the community and getting people to talk to and play with each other. The shared channel Tal mentions is the most important element. Get people used to chatting in it and organizing group runs through it.

Make sure people are talking to each other, especially your officers and the other guilds' officers. Stay up to date with what's going on and how people are feeling. Be sure that disputes get settled quickly, and establish some ground rules so that they don't bring raids to a halt. In other words - grievances get addressed after a raid, but they get addressed as promptly as possible, given officer availability.

In a newly forming alliance, the most obvious questions are going to be people not really knowing or trusting each other. Try to get some mixer raids going. Test the water with an OS-25 +1D or +2D run, perhaps.

[Zyn]

The most important thing to get right is the feeling that it's an alliance, work on the community and getting people to talk to and play with each other. The shared channel Tal mentions is the most important element. Get people used to chatting in it and organizing group runs through it.

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

[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.

[Mordekhuul]

What GG said.

What KotD did, back when we were lucky to have 8 members online at once and ZG was all the rage, was say "screw it", lets organize some 20 man raids with friends.

We decided, having experienced some MC alliances that ended up being just together long enough for one guild to recruit enough members to quit the alliance and do their own crap, canabalizing as much of their partner guilds as possible in the process, was that we would game mail all of our friends' lists in game.

We told them we were going to raid ZG on the same two nights every week, at the same time every week, and that if they committed to coming regularly, we would commit to giving them a spot. The important part there was OUR commitment to them. Once given a regular spot, we would not boot them from that guaranteed raiding spot even if we had new guildies join that wanted to raid. We gave non-guildies just as much preference when picking raiders for the night as we did any guildies, and new members of KotD were told on joining that members does not equal raiding spots, and that they should be just fine with Lurkers getting raid spots while they don't.

We had a "regulars list" of folks that had committed to raid regularly with us, and they were guaranteed spots if they signed up a day ahead of time. We then had an alternates list of folks that couldn't commit to be regular enough or wanted to be regular raiders but that we didnt' have room to give a spot to regularly.

You get the idea.

For the first month or three, it wasn't even specifically an alliance with just Lurkers. We had folks from 4-5 other guilds that were involved to some extent. Over time though, given the quality of Lurker players and their interest, they became the bulk of our regulars with just a handful of regulars from other guilds (we moved past ZG into Molten Core and beyond, finishing off BWL just days before TBC).

This is just one model, but it worked very well for us, and I'm mostly trying to emphasize that the key to a relationshp where one guild runs all raids and offers spots to non-guildies is to build trust through showing your commitment to their raiders. If they KNOW you aren't trying to poach their members or that you won't be kicking them two months later when you have enough members to raid without them, then it is a lot of fun.

Someone shoot me - I just rambled worse than GG ever does, and I'm tired so it probably makes half as much sense.

[Mavfin]

Someone shoot me - I just rambled worse than GG ever does, and I'm tired so it probably makes half as much sense.

<gives Morde an honorary "GG Wall of Text Award":D:wub:

[Kevin]

The important part there was OUR commitment to them.

Yep and you guys backed it up several times when issues arose. And yeah, I remember folks from other guilds.

But the trust part, when Lurkers was running raids in TBC with an alliance, was that we gave them X slots, that was negotiated based mainly on how many folks they were consistently bringing to their own runs. We looked for partners where 6-8 slots would be about 70-80% of their raiding folks. We let them choose who they wanted to bring which worked for us because at the time we had healing and tanking covered, but if they wanted to bring a tank or healer we could have one of ours go DPS.

And again the biggest reason for that model as opposed to the ones Keepers used was our desire to cater more to our players with less time to play and to be more able to bring our own guild members to raids if they wanted to, since we tend to not let you in the guild unless you are a quality player (which was more true then than it is now). That let us do rotations for our own players however we wanted without preventing our partner guild from having spots. It means that all our regular raiders also realize (and this is still true today) that they may be rotated out even if they want to raid and even if they are the best player in the guild. We have enough capable tanks and healers that we can sit down our "main tank" or our best healers and still be successful too (and of course we can sit our top DPS without issue as well, heck our top DPS is sometimes tanking or healing right now).


But show trust, be honest and you'll be fine. That does not require that you have all the members talking to each other in some common channel all the time. It does require your leadership to quickly communicate issues and responses to those issues though.

[shoju]

As a member of a very small guild pre-lurkers (which wasn't that long ago, last summer) I can tell you, that it's hard to make a good alliance work. Kaine and I worked feverishly to find a way to ally with another guild so that we could see content. The biggest problem that I ran into (and I'm sure that Kaine would say the same) is communication. Like it's been said a couple of times in this thread, if you don't have good communication, you are done. It wont last.

I can tell you after we failed at getting an alliance rolling, we merged. The guild we were in (mainly Kaine, Palpy, Vecindak, Myself, and a couple of others) merged with a kara guild. Things were rocky here, as the merger never worked out the way it was supposed to. Then, that guild merged with a t5 guild, and created more headaches. Every fail along the way to coming to the lurkers was because of Communication. The kara guild didn't communicate with us, and we were viewed as outsiders, and then when we all jumped to the bigger guild, it was even worse. The entirety of the absorbed population was shunned.


So please. Pretty please with sugar, whip cream, and a cherry on top, remember that it wont work unless you communicate.

[Sheep]

Thanks for all the helpful tips, everyone!

Unfortunately, it appears that while I was studying for an exam, my guild was busy sinking all week, with people jumping ship left and right. A friend of mine tells me that the guild leader already has a spot reserved for him in another guild, and that we've lost our healers and top 3 DPS.

I'll have to figure out where my new home will be, then worry about whether or not I can raid in Heroics.

[Tuftears]

That would be a D: moment, indeed. Sorry to hear about that!

[Jester]

<gives Morde an honorary "GG Wall of Text Award":D:wub:

It remains honourary. Morde's self-accusation aside, nobody can match a GG wall of text, no matter how hard they try.
:w00t:

-Jester

[PapaSmurf]

It remains honourary.

Zoinks! You've been in England too long! Oh wait your Canadian aren't you:)

[Jester]

Zoinks! You've been in England too long! Oh wait your Canadian aren't you:)

All rumours to the contrary, I'm afraid my colours have always been British, honourary or otherwise. Frankly it serves as a kind of armour, protecting me with vigour from the everpresent flavour of the neighbouring American culture.

:D

-Jester

[Klaus]

All rumours to the contrary, I'm afraid my colours have always been British, honourary or otherwise. Frankly it serves as a kind of armour, protecting me with vigour from the everpresent flavour of the neighbouring American culture.

:D

-Jester

I really wanted you to end that with "American cultoure". :)

[Jester]

I really wanted you to end that with "American cultoure". :)

If we used the transformation rules, I think we'd end up with "American culter." Thankfully, the extra "u" and the "re" spelling have been kept, for now.

:D

-Jester

[--Pete]

Hi,

All rumours to the contrary, I'm afraid my colours have always been British, honourary or otherwise. Frankly it serves as a kind of armour, protecting me with vigour from the everpresent flavour of the neighbouring American culture.

So that you may never run out:

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Let me know should you need some more;)

BTW, ieSpell just had a fit :w00t:

--Pete