Five years, and the tune never changes

One of the things I discovered when I was going through our guild's forum archives, deleting about two years worth when we were being evaluated by our forum host for suitability for Google ads, was that with regards to raiding, there have always been, and always ever seem to be, the same arguments about raiding.

1. We're becoming too hardcore/casual!
Since we are, at our heart, a casual guild, this comes up any time we set up standards for progression. We're still casual; we're just not going to stick our heads in the sand about what kind of requirements are needed for actually getting all the way through a particular tier of content. People have been squealing about this in our guild since Molten Core, but it's never really been true. We're not going to be a "raids 7 days/nights, you have to be at every raid" kind of guild. None of us have the time.

2. Loot Distribution.
Do long-time raiders have first dibs over newcomers? Do you roll for loot, use a point system, etc.? We've gone through several loot distribution methods, and there are still people who are worried about getting their shinies first. First shouldn't be as much of a concern as keeping the raid as a whole improving. Starving your newer players of loot through overly restrictive system doesn't help the raid as a whole, and if their butts in the seats are what's making the raid happen, you're not being fair to them.

3. Raid slot distribution.
Who gets to go when? I think this is something we generally do fairly well - we take people who are qualified first, people who aren't quite there but qualified for the next tier of content down next, and so on. Within each pool, the attendance gets shuffled around so that people still get an opportunity to raid. We don't have as many raid nights as we used to - a peak of six or so in late Vanilla, and we're down to about three - so it's harder to fit people in that it used to be. We used to just do roll outs, and if you were only available certain nights and had really bad luck, you could end up raiding next to never. Scheduling in advance at least lets people know they can make other plans some nights.

4. Mains and Alts.
What's a main? What's an alt? Which gets priority on invites/loot? Yeah, this is a perpetual topic for debate. Do you look at every character that person has ever played when defining the terms? Their active toons? Their toons on your server? Their toons in your guild?


I think what frustrates me the most about any of these topics is when someone takes one side at one point, and then when it's personally advantageous, or no longer personally advantageous, to support the other side, they switch. What that tells me is that neither position is right or wrong. So I tend to go with what seems to be in the best interests of the guild in the long term.