This post is about gear gaps and new servers. There's a disturbing connection between the two that will continue getting worse. The expansion will alleviate it to an extent, but then we'll be right back where we started...unless the xpack's 10man content delivers 40man raid quality loot.
There are a few things about this that is disheartening. If you browse the websites of most decent raid guilds you'll discover that they all require T2 gear or better in order to apply. For example take a look at FoH's recruitment page:
http://wow.fohguild.org/applications/FoHApplication.php Quote:
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We have moved to Black Dragonflight. We are taking Priest, Hunter and Mage applicants as a priority over all other classes. Rogues, Warlocks, Shaman and Druids being of the lowest priority. Warriors are still up in the air. We are looking for experienced raiders and not wanting to re-train new members, we also prefer your gear be full T2 or equal.
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I'm somewhat of a server/board/guild website junky. When on flights or if I'm bored I troll a lot of them. For some strange reason I have a fascination with trends with guilds and servers. Anyways...
The first thing that jumps to mind when I see this requirement is: Who has T2 or better armor and will join this guild? I figure most players who have that kind of loot already have a good guild. If they would dump them just to join a guild that's a little further in progression then I'm not so sure that person is a quality guild member. I guess there are other situations where a guild disbands or someone leaves for personal reasons...whatever. Overall it seems silly to me, but I can understand that some people fall into that category. I hesitate to even mention server xfers because I know of too many that do this just to escape a bad reputation. The good ones who xfer just make an already shitty server even shittier.
Plain and simple: Guilds don't want to spend any effort gearing up a player regardless of their playing skill or supposed dedication to raiding.
This is a frustrating problem for many thousands of players. If for whatever reason you do not already belong to a great raiding guild then you're kinda screwed. This goes especially for newer players. They would be great raiders and good people to have around, but they never have the chance since they are months or years behind in gear.
So what happens? New servers!! They all want new servers. Luckily for them new servers pop up fairly fucking often. However, I think there must come a point where bringing up new servers must end. That is, unless they take on a practice of merging all the lower population servers to justify opening new ones so people can have that 'fresh' server. However, time and time again these new servers surge at first then slowly die off. Very few survive this trend. Many of them are so damn empty you must wonder why anyone bothers to stay there. Blizzard can't beg enough to get people to roll there. They can't even trick them into doing it by purposely mis-labeling the server status (something they do frequently).
But ah...take a look at even those barren servers that Blizzard wants you to play on instead of asking for new ones. The serious raiding guilds all have a requirement...yep...T2 or better! I consider it silly for a guild to do this anyways since they are missing out on potentially great players, but it's bordering on foolish to do this on a low/medium population server. It's no wonder they all have to recruit consantly since the pool of available players is so small. That touches on a problem that even the big guilds on bigger servers have. They end up only recruiting people with high experience and gear, but they end up with higher turnover than is necessary because they place gear over player quality.
So a lot of players are just fucked and they can't do anything about it. Their best hope is to play on a new server. A lot of them get screwed over even then since these new servers have such unstable guilds. Those guilds will break apart or merge. They'll have assholes for leaders. Blah blah this, blah blah that. The cycle continues and thousands of players cry out for new servers.
Will the expansion solve this? I suppose if someone makes a new character on an old server, lvls to 70, and gets dungeon gear...well then they might be close to on par with tier 2 and 3 stuff. I wonder if guilds will recruit them? Seems likely. I wonder though, after a few months go by and guilds are raiding TBC will this gear gap return? Will the cycle just start all over again?
As I mentioned earlier I guess Blizzard could just constantly release new servers for years. I suppose they might have to merge the low pop servers then open a new one so everyone can get in on the fresh piece of ass.
Anyways I was thinking about all this and what better place to type it all down.
