Hi all and time once more for another one in my series of always sporadic, often rambling, blog posts.
This time as we head back into a brief heroic interlude once more in Battle for Dazar’alor before resuming our Mythic raiding vocation in the new tier, I want to write about how we’re looking to maintain Mythic raiding viability in what is a rather worrying overall scenario for WoW and its diminishing player base.
There is no need to tell you all how this expansion has been received generally, or about the clouds on the horizon over the future of Blizzard within an ever more encroaching Activision (a.k.a the Sha of Greed) but you’ll all be aware that our central raiding mission has always been to offer a home aimed at veteran, mature gamers that still want to raid at the highest level and a friendly and well run place in which to do it.
Unfortunately, veteran raiders that want to or are able to commit to the rigours and requirements of a Mythic raiding scene aimed at the younger, more agile player are getting fewer and ever further between and the number of potential homes offering weekend, afternoon or two day per week Mythic raiding have grown from a handful in the world to several on each server as the niche’s value became clearer to others.
This makes it very difficult to recruit new raiders, especially from our key 25+ demographic and so we increasingly have had to make concessions to younger raiders in the 20-25 bracket in order to retain numerical viability and indeed these now make up an ever larger part of a team that is as the end of the day also now raid lead by a 21 year old and no longer this old soldier.
This newer, younger influx has however not just brought in numbers, it has also bought in ability, awareness and increased levels of commitment to the Mythic raiding scene’s needs and so we’re seeing greater numbers of players with viable, geared and raid ready alts that together with a core of reliable, ≈100% regulars are honestly all that have kept us viable at times.
We definitely all owe those that do what some of us won’t or can’t do a debt of gratitude for where we are currently in raid viability terms. So let me say thank you.
So, how are the raid team officer core and I planning for the future? Well, here we’re going to be focusing on a couple of key changes aimed at making our raiding future more effective and secure.
Firstly, we’ll be quietly removing the currently stated age bar of 25+ for applicants to the raid team. The guild will remain a guild for mature, adult individuals and we certainly won’t be letting in anyone that we wouldn’t have let in before, but we will be removing the disincentive to players under 25 from at least trying their luck with an application. Call it gate removal if you will as we won’t be changing how we evaluate applications, nor are we any more likely to accept 18 year olds into the guild, but hopefully it will mean we end up with more 20-25 year old players feeling that filling in a long application form is not as likely to be a waste of their time as it currently would appear to be. For social members we’ll continue to adopt an approach that remains biased towards only adding people closer to the older demographic of this part of the guild.
Secondly, raid alts. We’ll be looking at ways of encouraging and rewarding regular players that maintain viable and useful raid alts for the raid team so that we can further grow the strength-in-depth of the raid team roster with players that bring something extra to the table rather than a single class or often, spec. To this end the Champion rank will be reserved for those players that do this and no longer be solely a badge of consistency in regularity, but one of recognition for the going that increasingly necessary extra mile to reduce our reliance on a larger roster. I encourage any players (especially melee) interested in getting one or more alts ready for BoD to get in touch with their role leader and see what classes we need going forward as only those we actually use will count. Just to be clear, it’s not a requirement, I personally won’t be able to do it myself even, but we do want to broaden this ‘norm’ into more raiding roles, especially where currently we have to either field you in one role/spec or sit you with no other options available.
More characters, fewer regular players needed for the roster with more specs and roles covered by the people we already have.
In more general terms as we’ve now filled all the team leadership roles once more, we’ll also be looking to improve the amount of feedback we’re providing to players and to reducing our reliance on ‘the perfect try’ to be our route to a first kill of a boss by getting basics (stand on that bloody rock!!!) settled earlier than has recently been the case.
Lastly, we’d also like to encourage all the guild’s members to play together more regularly, running content together and helping us to all get our M+, Islands and whatnot done so we can reduce the spread of Azerite gearing, Origination stacks or whatever that are too wide at present in the raid team roster and needs to change going forward if we’re not to be letting the team down.
To this end I will set-up some recurring regular evening guild calendar events for players to sign up for an so show their availability and willingness to run content with their guild mates.
In conclusion, I know a lot of this all sounds like work and we’re all more than a little tired of working at this game, but unfortunately that’s what Mythic raiding is, it’s not a step in and out with as little commitment as we can get away with scene anymore sadly. This is especially true as we have an ever larger number of players in guild and team that do not treat it this way. It’s not fair to them for us to coast and it’s not fair on the team’s longer term viability if Mythic is to remain our end goal difficulty or if we’re to continue to attract Mythic oriented players to WW rather than them going to other, more successful, raiding guilds.
Thanks for reading.
