[Ravvenn]

Scroll to the bottom for the short version!!

I am the one who did a majority of our rules and recruitment page, most information was decided within the guild and/or the officers. I can assure you, this isn't out to bust the balls of a bunch of emotastic potential applicants. It is the best decision for a busy (<--keyword) raiding guild.

Prior to Naxxramas, the applicants we took in were T1 or worse; gear-wise. But why now? Well because this is undefeated content, we are not going to break away from our learning time to gear up someone. I don't care if they suck or not at this point, but I can tell you this much.

• Gearing up someone takes time away from raiding and/or learning new encounters.
  
• Gearing up someone may result in realizing said someone sucks, and you just wasted your time.
  
• Gearing up someone means every single zone we drag them through to get loot we have to explain all of these encounters over again.
  
• What happens once they are geared and are allowed inside of Naxxramas? We have to explain these encounters...again.
  

These rules were made for the reason that we aren't wasting our time on someone, period. Harsh? Maybe. But that's the way it is. We have a lot of other people to look out for that are our members, we aren't looking out for the well being of anyone who isn't. Had they really wanted to be in our guild, they would have done anything to get in.

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 have about 6 pages of applications and I'd say at least 4 of them are in full T2 or damn close.

Where do these well geared apps come from? They fall from the sky, literally. Every single one of our new members have full T2, and even some T3. Some guilds do not make it. We have a former Naxxramas guild LEADER as an applicant, we have some members of a guild that broke up after transferring to our server. Shit happens, and we know shit happens - why would we want someone who has no experience beyond 5 man instances over people with the current 40 man raid zone experience?

I bet there are a lot of crappy people in epic gear out there, I am positive of it - we have rejected some. I'd rather have 39 people in our raid than 40 people and 1 of them sucking, or being so gimped out that we have to spend a week or two gearing him/her up so he doesn't die to a single AE.

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.

Even before we moved to BDF we had pre-applicants, we constantly have applications flowing in even though I have posted here and on server boards that recruitment is closed. We rejected about 40 people, and I am sure many didn't suck, within the past month. Why? 'Cause there is no room for them in our guild. It has nothing to do with loot or skill, it has to do with being the class we wanted, the personality we wanted with the skill and playtime we wanted.

Guilds lose members easily, whether people quit, get burnt out, go back to school, have babies, marry/date people who don't play games, quit to play other games, etc. When it happens to other guilds, they pick up where the people left off, or they fall apart. When it happens to us, we try to replace them as fast as possible, and we hope that it doesn't hurt us much. The best option for the current content, is to let people with experience and armor apply and have priority over anyone who does not.

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.

We took in people with green loot before (Hi Darph!). We have had so many people in the worst gear ever apply to our guild and are decked out in good gear now, but this was during MC/BWL farm status times. Naxxramas (Gothik, Loatheb and on) is not cleared and aside from Tuesday (aka free lewtz day - In no particular order; Noth, Razuvious, Anub, Faerlina, Maexxna, Patchwerk, Grob, Gluth, Thaddius) - we are not done there and will not break away from there except on weekends, and whatever we raid on weekends, we sell to people ~ otherwise, we take the weekend off and/or farm stuff.


I do not see what is such a letdown about any of this. This is the way it is. I will not compare 5 man, 10 man or even 20 man shit to 40 man shit. Why? Because if C'thun was designed for 10 people everyone would pick 10 smart people and win. If you have 35 smart people and 5 retards on C'thun, I can promise you - you will hate those 5 retards by the end of the night and shout curses upon them and their future offspring.

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?

There is nothing to solve, so, the answer is no. It is not the job of the high end guild to wipe your ass (by your ass, I mean whoever is sandy about this). They should not have to key you and gear you up all because you -said- you were very skilled. It is not Blizzard's flaw here. The casual and hardcore debate is just as retarded as this one is.

They did not make you solo for this long and then decide you want to join a guild who made the choices to only allow people with X and Y armor to join. I guess if we only recruit Warriors, and you're a Mage, Blizzard is to blame for that, too. There must be something terribly wrong with Mages, huh? Blizzard did not make us want people in T2, we are lazy and don't want to gear someone up who has had a goddamn year to find a way to do it on their own.

If you have not raided, how would YOU know that YOU would be a huge loss for a raiding guild not giving you a shot? Why would they believe that you would make such a great addition as a raiding member, when you have not raided anything?

If you owned a top notch catering company would you hire a single man with no experience beyond the microwave to prepare full meals for a party of 40? How about if he claims he can nuke a mean Pizza Roll?

I wouldn't.

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So there it is, since the application was so eye catching and I am the one to blame for it, I may as well explain it. I am sure I covered everything.

If you want the short story, here it is.

We are lazy and don't want to gear anyone up. We would rather sell the loot.