Rethinking the raid guild

[Professor Frink]

Short answer: Yes, I would be interested, assuming my interest in wow in general survives the expansion coming out (I'd say ~40% chance). I've seen a few guilds that I or RL friends of mine have been in who have tried things along the lines of what I think you want, but usually in a timid or too-little-too-late fashion. It's very leader-dependent, you need someone willing to make the time commitment and with the emotional stamina to ignore the BS and those who produce it, who is also competent at the actual mechanics of playing the game. I'll assume for the sake of argument that you're willing and able:)

There's two big decisions to be made; who you take to your runs, and how you split up loot. These are, imho, entirely seperate concerns. Things like whining about loot or being overly "greedy" are solved with a well-thought-out loot scheme; this is essentially a solved problem. Problems like taking ill-timed afk breaks, learn2play issues, general negativity and not valuing other people's time are not likely to be solved by messing with the loot, but I think your plans to keep that sort of thing in line by making you less likely to be invited back has a lot of potential.

Traditionally, this is done by the useful poeple in the guild identifying each other and leaving, but this is really inefficent and I agree with you that it'd be better to go from the beginning with the idea that the good people can stay and the bad ones can go instead.

And now, a little negitivity of my own where I point out things i've spectacularly not work before:

How performance is measured is something that would be a work in progress undertaken by the members of that raid role, with some supervision from the top.

This won't work. You're not going to be able to offload responsibility for judging people to the people being judged. It would probably be sufficent to hand-pick a couple of people and assign them roles to fill and a number of slots to do it in, from a list of people deemd "good enough to take" (possibly but not necessarily the entire guild). In other words, the class-leader system that generally works just fine given good enough class leaders, though there's nothing sacred about haveing an exactly 1:1 class:leader ratio.

If you want the system to be somewhat more transparent I could see telling your class leaders to use some sort of carrot/stick point system and a general policy of taking the person with the better rating.

DKP is an issue. We don't want someone coming in, being crap all the time, and walking out with 10 epics after their first month. I would like to use DKP as a valve to control recruitment applications. Basically if we're successful and everyone wants to join us then no DKP for your first month (in other words you have to make the cut at least once to get any loot whatsoever). While building up we'll probably set it to no DKP earned for your first week

This part in particular looks like a solution in search of a problem. Your loot distribution system should not be so broken that people who just started raiding with you are getting gear that other people want. Just use one of the dozens of loot systems that don't suck. People should be permitted to accrue credit from day one; it encourages performance much more effetively than vague threats of being kicked from a guild that you just joined.

-- frink