Cold Comfort

Guild Management and Leadership in WoW

Turning Over the Reins, Pt 3

Feb 8

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management | No Comments

747637749 4bda0d7df1 Turning Over the Reins, Pt 3

The image theme lost steam somewhere around article 2...

This is part 3 of an article series: Jump to Part 1 or Part 2

Ok, so now we have some idea of how to transfer leadership and have gone into depth on the things that guild leaders do.  Now let’s talk about ways to make leadership transitions easier.

Even if you’re not going through a leadership move right now, adopting some of these ideas will make it much easier when and if that day comes.  And if it never does, you still end up with some neat benefits.

In the course of this article, I’m going to make reference to a few specific companies and/or products.  These are simply ones that I use or are familiar with.  If there’s a link to them, it’s not an affiliate or referer link.  If you know of alternative providers or products, feel free to mention them in a comment, but keep the links generic.  Thanks.

Making Contacts Generic

Much of the things that you need to transfer can be made easier by using generic contacts rather than specific people.  Create an email account for the guildmaster, one for the webmaster, one for recruiting, and so on.  Even if one person does all of these jobs, create separate email addresses so that you can split responsibilities up.  Then forward the mail from those accounts to the actual person doing the job right now.

In all of your web apps and online contacts, use the pseudo-aliases rather than personal email addresses.  This way, when the person doing the job changes (even just temporarily) you can just go and change where the forwarding points to rather than re-configuring the thing that sends the mail.

If you intend for people to be able to reply from the pseudo-address, you may need to be more selective in the manner you get your email.  Most desktop email clients let you change the “From” address in your emails.  Some let you swap between several on the fly.  Not as many web email systems support sending with alternate From addresses, but Google mail does.  If you’ve never set it up, it’s easy.  Go into your gmail settings and select the Accounts tab.  Then click on “add a mail account you own”.  This will send an email with a link to that address.  Log into the other account, click on the link, and you’ll be able to use that as your From address when replying to emails.

You can also set gmail to make the From address sticky: if someone sends mail to guildmaster@guild.com which forwards to your personal account, you will by default reply as that account.  This will save you from accidentally exposing your personal email address.

There is one caveat: once this “send as” functionality is configured, you can’t revoke it.  If someone leaves the guild, they can continue to send as lootmaster@guild.com.  But if they were using a desktop mail client like Thunderbird, they could do the same thing.  Remember, you can never trust the “From” address on email.  You can’t really trust any part of email, to be honest.  The underlying tech was developed in a simpler time before spam and malware.  Backwards compatibility preclues massive changes to email to make it more secure, so you just have to live with the way it is.

Billing Accounts

When it comes to services that require exchange of real money, you can probably get away with using a generic email address, but you can’t make up a generic name for payment details (nor would you want to).  You will have to go in and change these details, and ideally the person leaving the role will remove their billing details from the account before the next person takes on the position.  At least by using a generic email notices about the account (like “your Ventrilo service is due to expire in two weeks”) won’t be sent to someone who is no longer associated with the guild.

(more) Your Own Domain

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Turning Over the Reins, Pt 2

Feb 4

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management | 3 Comments

Matrix Turning Over the Reins, Pt 2

This is part 2 of an article series: Jump to Part 1 or Part 3

This article might be a bit dry compared to part 1.  It’s meant to be an expansion of the things that a GM does, and will (I hope) be useful for a GM planning their retirement or a new GM starting up a guild.

In some ways, this is also a list of tasks that a GM might choose to delegate to officers, regardless of whether a leadership change is in the works.  If you use it for this purpose, you may also want to read the article “To Officer or Not To Officer?”.

So, please ignore the blindingly obvious stuff and perhaps you’ll learn a bit about some of the subtle things that guild leaders take care of.

The Figurehead

The most obvious role of the guild leader is as a figurehead.  Even if you none of the other items below, it’s your name at the top of the roster, and it’s you that people will look to to set the direction of the guild.

The only important point to make here is that the guild leader should make a regular appearance within the guild.  This seems obvious, but have you ever had a guild leader switch mains and stop logging on on the high-rank character except for brief maintenance tasks?  If you ever make such a switch, be sure to make your primary character the titular guild leader so that members (especially those who are new) can more easily find you.

Loot System Guru and Maintainer

Loot systems can be very complex beasts.  The good ones keep things complexity from the members, but all stateful systems have a certain amount of upkeep that tends to fall to the guild leadership.

This upkeep comes in two forms: the operation of the loot system during raids, and the maintenance of the loot system on a regular basis.  It’s quite common for the officers to know the former, but the latter is often locked away in the guild leader’s head for no other reason than that nobody else is interested in learning it.

For the day-to-day operation of the loot system, make sure that all the officers can be the loot master on a raid.  If an addon is required, all the officers need to run it on all raids.  If you keep track of loot for upload into a web DKP system, or for posting on a website, more than one person should be logging in case someone gets disconnected or experiences a crash.

The guts of the loot system is knowledge that should be distributed among the officers at all times.  I recall a guild I was in where we had to switch to EP/GP because the guild leader went AWOL and none of the officers had the ability to add new members to the web-based DKP system.

To ensure that this knowledge is properly distributed, assign loot management to a different officer each week (or each raid at your preference).  The guild leader should do nothing with the loot system other than answer questions.  Every time you find something that an officer can’t do, permissions should be modified rather than having the guild leader step in and do it themselves.

At some level, most web-based loot management systems will have a administrative password which can only be held by one person.  We’ll talk a bit more about how to manage such passwords in part 3.

Also make sure that the periodic tasks related to the loot system are known.  This may be as simple as clicking the “Decay” button if you’re using EP/GP or as complex as looking through the entire member list on a web-based system looking for people who haven’t raided in a certain amount of time.  Whatever has to be done regularly should be accessible by officers, as well as the corrective actions that may come out of it.

One word of advice that applies equally to any job where you rely on “the officers” to do it: if you assign a task to a group of people, you only guarantee that everyone will think that someone else will do it.  Rotate the job around the officer corps if you like, but make sure that an individual is tasked with it for each week / month as you see fit.

One element of the loot system that tends to remain with the guild leader (because it’s policy) is revising the loot policy when new content comes out.  If Blizzard maintains their form, every major content patch will have an “orb” of some sort and possibly a new way of upgrading your gear with a token.  It’s the guild leader’s job to go through the loot policy once these details are known and make sure that the policy is clear on how these will be distributed before you first see them drop.  Don’t wait until the first piece of a legendary item drops to figure out how you’re going to assign it to someone.

Recruiter

While you may have an officer or senior member do the palm rubbing and face-to-face recruiting, the guild leader may have a lot to do behind the scenes once someone joins the guild as a trial member.  They may need to create (or approve the creation) of a new user account on the forum, loot, and scheduling websites.

If your guild uses a rigid trial period, or member voting for acceptable of a trial, there may be a special forum post to be made, or polls to set up.  Once someone becomes a full member, many of these sites will need to be visited again to change the member’s status.

All of these are candidates for delegation to an officer, so long as the full process is documented.

A guild leader may also hold certain personal accounts that factor into the guild’s recruiting strategy.  For example, the guild recruitment forums on Elitist Jerks and TankSpot are only accessible to donors, or in some cases a one-off fee.  If you rely on such threads to bring you applicants, make sure that the access to this account (if allowed by the site) is transferred, or a new paid account is set up.  You don’t want to be locked out of your quality recruiting thread because of a leadership change.

Banker

The guild leader often takes charge of keeping the guild bank free of junk which may accumulate.  They may also ensure that the consumables tab is properly stocked by passing mats to a crafter.

Depending on the trust level in your officers, you may be able to delegate this.  Even if you allow unfettered officer access to the guild bank, you need to have some guidance as to what should be sold and when.  Perhaps you keep BoE items and patterns that drop in your raids to give members a chance to purchase them before they go onto the AH.  Are these announced to members, and if they don’t sell internally how long do you keep them before selling them to outsiders?

Raid Manager

Who decides when you raid?  Who sets up the invites, and decides who raids and who sits if there are more raiders than spots?

If you do have to sit people on a regular basis, do you keep track of who was asked to sit and try to get them a starting position on a future raid (balance concerns allowing)?  If so, where is this tracked?

As I mentioned in part 1, if you have a functioning raid schedule when you change guild leaders, keep it – at least for a month.  Once guild I was in decided to drop the “Sunday raids start half an hour early” after a guild leader swap.  Not only that, the change wasn’t made consistently.  As a result, we never started our Sunday raids on time and had less time in the instance.

Rank Maintenance

How do people move from trial to member to raider rank?  Do your members have to maintain a certain percentage of attendance to remain at a raider rank?  What about people who don’t log in for several months – do you purge them to keep the roster under control?

Most of these should be delegated to officers, but the periodic cleanup may be something that the guild leader took care of from time to time.  Document it and assign it to a specific person to manage once a month.

Policy Manager and Goal Setter

Beyond your loot policy, you should review all your policies from time to time, checking whether they still reflect the way the guild is mananged.  Ideally, as the operation of the guild changes the policies are updated alongside, but this is quite time intensive and anyone can fall behind.

If a policy needs to change to reflect the way the guild operates, you probably don’t need to make any announcement – just post the changes and indicate that it’s to reflect reality.  If on the other hand you feel that the policy needs revision to serve the guild better, go with a transparent approach and provide both justification and advance warning.  But as I advised in part 1 of this series, don’t start doing that right away.

Don’t forget to keep your goals up to date either.  These will require updating more frequently than policies, but at the very least, they should be updated every time a major content patch comes out.  Updating them during seasonal slowdowns during the summer and end of the year is also a good idea.

Webmaster

I’ve saved the obvious intersections with real life until the end.

When it comes to guild websites, there’s many different choices.  The simplest is a free sub-domain of one of the popular guild hosting sites like Guildportal, Guildomatic, Guildlaunch and the like.  You get a bunch of pre-made widgets to throw together, and various levels of customization.  The domain name won’t be very memorable, but you can get up and running quickly.  You won’t have the flexibility to put different third party packages like eqDKP or WebDKP.

Transferring sites like this is fairly simple because everything is hosted by one site.  There’s just one password list.

A guild that puts a lot of effort into their website might have multiple packages – a front page portal, a forum, a DKP or loot site, a scheduling system, etc.  Depending on where each comes from, they may be able to share passwords or they may be separate.  If the person managing your website is particularly crafty, they might set up some kind of password synchronization of their own design.

The guild leader may not be the person who sets up and runs all of these pieces, but they should have administrative access to all of them.  If you leave the website management to an officer or trusted member, you are just as much at risk if they leave, and and officer leaving may not be something that you think to plan for in as much depth.

However your guild website is set up, make sure that the person responsible makes a short list of everything that goes into it.  A list of software packages and where to download them.  A brief description of how the bits plug together, and whether any patches or other changes were made to the software.  You want to know where to start re-building if that ever becomes necessary.  A regular backup should also be part of the websmaster’s job – but don’t forget to test them.  Nothing’s worse than finding out that your “Backup and Restore” system was just a “Backup” system when you need it most.

If you go with paid website hosting, make sure the guild leader has access to the billing account.  If the account is in the name of the former guild leader, you may need to contact the hosting provider to get both the account and the billing moved over.  Though it may be tempting to just keep paying the bills and leave the account details untouched, don’t do it – when you need to talk to support or customer service, you’ll run into roadblocks if you can’t prove that you’re the account holder.

If you have a custom domain name, bear in mind that both the registration and DNS may be completely separate from your web hosting.  Many providers offer all three, but sometimes you’ll find setups where each is handled by a different company.  Make sure that you transfer ownership of the domain if it’s still in the old guild leader’s name.  If the domain provider isn’t changing, you may be able to do this via a portal.  If you’re moving hosting companies, you’ll need to get a transfer authorization code to give to your new provider, as well as unlocking the old domain for transfer at the old provider.

Voicemaster

I highly recommend that guilds have their own hosted Ventrilo server rather than piggybacking on a free service.  Professional services aren’t that expensive – $85 a year for a 30 user server, which is less than $0.50 per month if even half of those users contribute.  A 10 person guild could get away with half that.  Many providers make it easy for you guild members to contribute individually.

Like a website, the Ventrilo service will have both a billing account and an admin account.  On top of that, each server has a configuration file and set of custom channels, each of which may have channels.  The guild leader should have all of these passwords.  Most voice providers give you some way to back up these settings, which makes it a bit easier to re-create the server on another provider, or even on another account with the same provider if you can’t change the name of the registered account holder.

Have I missed anything?

In the final article of this series, we’ll examine some ways in which you can set up your guild to make the migration from one guild leader to another easier.

This is part 2 of an article series: Jump to Part 1 or Part 3

Turning Over the Reins

Feb 1

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management | No Comments

matrixcoconut Turning Over the Reins

This article was suggested by Veliaf of Imperial Guardsmen.

I currently run a small guild in WoW, and have done for several years, but in the near future I’m going to be leaving WoW for a few months (probably until Cataclysm is released). Obviously this means I’ll be stepping down as GM, and this leads to questions such as who is going to take over, in what capacity, and so on.

We (that is, myself and my three officers) of course want to make the transition as smooth as possible to avoid disruption to the guild.

Managing the transition from one guild leader to another can be quite stressful.  As much as you may try to make the guild about the members, the purpose and the policies, some of your members will always put you on a pedestal and think that you stepping down means the end of the guild as they know it.

The good news: you’re thinking about it ahead of time.  The more preparation you put into this, the smoother things will go.  Many times a GM disappears without notice, catching the officers by surprise and leaving them without some of the critical privileges they need to keep the guild moving forward.

Veliaf posed some specific questions, which in and of themselves could fill an article.  But this is a huge topic to cover properly, because in order to manage the transition from one guild leader to another, you have to have an appreciation for everything that a guild leader does.  While anyone can can give a general description of what a guild leader does, it would probably be limited to the visible in-game and figurehead aspects of the position.  Guild leaders tend to do much more behinds the scenes.

To give this it’s proper due, I’m going to split this into three medium-sized articles rather than two very large ones.  First, we’ll talk about how to manage the transition itself – choosing a new guild leader, communicating the change to your members and keeping the guild on an even keel throughout the process.  Next, we’ll go a bit more in depth as to all the things that a guild leader does.  This will also serve as a laundry list of tasks that may be suitable for delegation rather than transferring them all onto one person.  Finally, I’ll talk about the practical steps you can take to prepare for your temporary or permanent departure from a guild so that you can quickly transfer leadership and deal with real life.

Crunch Time or No?

Your immediate goals for handling a leadership transfer are going to be very different depending on whether the change is planned or not.  If the current GM has decided that they need to move on and you have even a couple of weeks to make that happen, your job is going to be much much easier.

If your current GM just logged on to transfer leadership and gquit, you need to keep the guild operating smoothly while you plan out the transition.  The worst possible situation is that your GM has disappeared or announced their departure but hasn’t transferred leadership.

If you find yourself with an AWOL guild leader, you can petition a GM to transfer leadership to an officer after the account has been inactive for 30 days.  I believe that the account needs to have no login activity, so in the rare case that the GM has moved to a new realm but is actively playing, there may not be much you can do.  Until you can get control of the guild leader rank, what you can do will be limited.

I’ll go over the various things to deal with in the sections below.  If you’re dealing with an unexpected GM change, you will probably be most interested in:

  • Steady As She Goes
  • Selecting a New Leader
  • Replacing What’s Been Lost
  • Changing Things Up

If the move is planned, then you’ll find more relevant advice in:

  • Selecting a New Leader
  • Guidance Before Retirement
  • Handing Over the Keys
  • Steady As She Goes
  • Preparing For a Return
  • Changing Things Up
  • The Golden Parachute

I can only give each of these a short treatment, so if there is a topic that you’d think would be a good standalone article, please leave a comment.

(more) Steady as She Goes...

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Trying to Solve the World’s Problems

Jan 28

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management | 3 Comments

sbPuzzled Trying to Solve the Worlds Problems

One of the things that has dogged me whenever I’ve been a guild leader is a desire to solve every problem that I am made aware of.  Even outside of a leadership position, I tend to internalize every little thing that goes wrong.

I have high standards for myself, and when I find myself playing with people who don’t share those standards, I get frustrated.  That’s bad enough in itself, but taking it a step further and trying to “fix” those people is completely futile.  I’m rarely going to be successful, and when my attempts fail, I’ll just get more frustrated.

Of course, I can’t take a completely laid back position – even if my personality would allow for it, there are some problems that guild leadership should address.  There are valid performance and behavioural issues that leaders should raise and address when the see them.  The skill lies in knowing what the scope of leadership covers, and what is not your problem to solve, even if you think you can help.

The core problem is a theme that’s come up before – trying to assert control over others.  Too little leads to chaos, while too much leads to a guild nobody wants to be a part of.  If you’ve ever felt that your guild was “slipping out of control”, you may be facing a mismatch between how much you want to control and how much you can.

Sometimes, the frustration with that gap gets turned inwards.  Rather than the problem being unrealistic expectations, you see the problem as an inability to maintain order.  At that point, the thing you enjoy becomes a chore.

The solution is to get realistic about what is and what isn’t the responsibility of guild leadership.  From the pile of things that are the responsibility of the guild, figure out what you are capable of doing and what needs to be delegated.  Don’t get pulled into things that aren’t the guild’s problems.

Simple advice, but if it were so obvious and easy to follow, I’d have no reason to write this post.  So let’s take a look at some of the issues that you might encounter as a guild leader:

Retention

You can’t expect to keep every one of your members forever.  Guilds are by definition a collection of like-minded but not identically minded individuals.  Everyone sacrifices a few ideals when they join a guild in exchange for the benefits that the guild offers them.

Some people will, against their better judgement, give up more than they really want to, and allow this to fester over time.  Over time, subtle things in the guild may change, or a new policy may be introduced which push them past their breaking point – when the sacrifice seems too much.

So long as you aren’t actively making policies to antagonize specific people, or going out of your way to alienate members, this isn’t your fault.  Some people will be happier elsewhere, and the best thing to do is part company on a friendly note in case they come to regret their decision and you need their class/spec.

(more) Infighting...

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The Service of Officers

Jan 25

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management | 1 Comment

In scrounging the US and EU guild relations forums for inspiration, I came across this post on abuse within the officer ranks.  I haven’t quite got enough to say on that particular subject at the moment, but one thing the OP said jumped out at me:

All I got in response was him arguing with me for two hours saying that I’d turned his [sic] back on him, and stolen his glory

I’m assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that the “glory” referred to is the glory of being an officer within the guild.

*blink* *blink*

I would hope that I’m not the only guild leader who is surprised to hear the role of officer as being glorious.  At best, it can be frustrating and a source of additional work.  In a fair guild, I’d think that the most reward you could expect to get out of being an officer is an increased chance at being part of a raid, but only for mechanical reasons like needing a loot master – not just because you’re an officer.

I know I’m being a bit naïve here.  The guild relation forums and plenty of blogs are replete with examples of people who have abused their power as an officer.  Offenses range anywhere from ego-tripping to guild bank theft to outright sexual harassment.  But I doubt that this corruption stems from the position of being an officer.  Rather, these are examples of selfish, broken people who would press any advantage they were given.  WoW, and the anonymity it provides, just provides an outlet.  Think of it as an extension of Gabe’s G.I.F.T theorem (warning: NSFW).

The point I’m trying to make is that when you’re doing it right, being a part of guild leadership is a service to the members of your guild, not really a position of power.  It may not have the strict delineations of something like participatory politics, but you’re supposed to be facilitating the operation of the guild – not for reward but because you want to see the guild prosper.

Learning From Others – if That’s Possible

The problem then becomes one of finding people who agree with this sentiment to be your officers.  Obviously it’s not that easy based upon the reports of abuse.  I would like to dismiss these (numerous as they are) as being big on profile but not on significance.  Guilds don’t post on the guild relations forum or write on blogs when everything is going swimmingly.  Nobody keeps statistics on things like guild lifetime or officer and member turnover, so it’s hard for us to look at “the most successful guilds” and emulate their ways.

To the larger WoW community, success equals progression, but there’s no evidence to suggest that top progression guilds have the best leadership practices.  It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that most top progression guilds have a harsher leadership regime than many of us would be comfortable with – but that the members know that when they join and agree to fall in line because it gives the desired result.

I’m going to whip out the wide brush and paint guilds one of three colors:

  • guilds whose officers are the friends of the guild leader
  • guilds whose officers are simply the people willing to do the job
  • guilds whose officers are picked for their ability to do the job

There’s obviously some overlap here.  Just because you’re the friend of the guild leader doesn’t mean that you’re not capable of being a good officer and willing to put the extra time in.  Just because your guild leader doesn’t put much thought into who becomes an officer doesn’t mean that they won’t end up with a few good people in that role.  However, if you don’t take the third approach to selecting officers, then the experience for your members will be inconsistent at best.

You may have a really good recruiting officer who finds good candidates, answers all their questions before they apply, and helps shepherd them through the trial period.  Then they ask a question of the loot officer, who turns around and acts like a total tool.  Or perhaps the loot officer isn’t around, so they act another officer who doesn’t quite know all the ins and outs of the system.  They get bad information that leads them to make a mistake while in a raid.

(more) The minimum role of an officer

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Reasonable Expectations

Jan 21

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management, Raiding | 1 Comment

expectations Reasonable Expectations

Against my better judgement, I’ve started working on gearing up another of my characters that I abandoned after hitting 80 in the month after the WotLK launch.  I’d finished with all of my EoT gear on my Paladin and Shaman, and told myself that I was just going to get exalted with two factions for a couple of tailoring patterns.  In the course of doing that, I ended up getting enough EoT to pick up a couple of pieces of Tier 9, and before long I found myself chain-queueing for heroics on a character that I was going to let rot until Cataclysm.

That’s a long way of saying that I’ve been running even more dungeon finder groups than is my custom recently.  It’s taking a bit of a toll on me – I find myself having less patience with people than I’d like to, and at times acting like a jerk in response to jerkish behaviour.  I wiped a group on heroic Halls of Reflection because I refused to exploit the escape encounter with them.  Technically, they wiped themselves, as I was just standing in a safe spot and didn’t move to heal when when the first wave of adds came, but it’s the same thing in the end.

Around the point where my frustration was getting the better of me, I read an interesting article by Matthew Rossi on wow.com.  In short, he says that putting raid-level expectations onto the people you meet in dungeon finder groups is not only a recipe for driving yourself batty but is unfair to everyone involved.

Between the point of his article and the ongoing commentary from my post on selfishness, I started to think about why these groups were getting to me.  Was it the groups, or me?  Were the groups completing the dungeon?  Yes, for the most part – maybe 5% of the groups I’ve been in have failed to complete the instance, and that was usually on the path to Tyrannus in the Pit of Saron.

Reflection

So if the groups were completing the dungeon, and I was getting my emblems and rolls on loot, why was I getting annoyed?  It was because the groups weren’t living up to my expectations.

A much wiser man than me gave me this sage advice: “expectations are just premeditated resentments”.

The groups that I meet in the dungeon finder don’t tick a check box that says “I promise to live up to the standards of an experienced four-year raider”.  So why was I treating them like they had?

In my defense, I’m pretty lenient about performance compared to some people.  The numbers I quoted in the selfishness articles are the ones I live by – I don’t complain about DPS unless they’re consistently below 1500, and I’ll happily heal a tank with 25k buffed HP through the original heroics.  But when it comes to situational awareness and having respect for other people, I take a hard line.  Neither of these are required for random heroics.  The fomer makes things run a bit more smoothly and the lack of the latter is more a comment on society as a whole than WoW in specific.

Yet I find myself pushing the things that are important to me on people who may have a completely different set of values.  I like clean execution.  The myriad melee DPS who have killed themselves on Krystallus obviously don’t.  But they seem to have fun and don’t blame anyone but themselves.  Obviously I’m taking things a bit too seriously if someone else gets themselves killed and I let that bother me.

Does this mean that I’m going to instantly become an easy-going dungeon runner that lets nothing bother him?  Not likely.  But I will try to put myself in the shoes of people who don’t take this game as seriously, and not judge them so harshly.

(more) Type A Personality...

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Bridging the 10 to 25 Gap

Jan 18

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management, Raiding | 3 Comments

bridge 450 Bridging the 10 to 25 Gap

In the post on guild mergers, I talked a little about what to do when you’re trying to expand from a 10 person to 25 person guild.  Today, I’d like to expand on that a bit outside of the context of mergers or alliances (the latter of which will be covered in a future post).  Hopefully this one won’t turn into an opus (I honestly didn’t expect the last few to run so long, that was just how they looked when I finished writing).

So, you’ve got a 10 person guild.  Perhaps you started it with a few friends, perhaps it was a group of former guild members who left your old guild at the same time, or perhaps you just stuck it out in the trade channel until you had enough people to run a regular 10 person raid.  You may be happy with the situation, but a few of your guild members are making noise about the better loot that they want out of the 25 person raids.  You’re not certain, but you suspect that the sentiment is a common one – people want to run what they perceive to be the “best” content, and for many people that means 25 man raids.

Some practical ideas on how to proceed then:

Is This a Good Idea?

First, make sure the sentiment is commonly held.  It may just be one person rabble-rousing, and you may be better encouraging them to seek a guild that is running 25 person content rather than try to push the guild into what can be a tumultuous period in its life.

There are two points to remember here: Blizzard has decided, at least in WotLK, that 25 person content gives one tier better loot than 10 person content.  They have not, however committed to continuing to do so in Cataclysm.  Remember than the 10/25 versions of every raid were a bit of an experiment for Blizzard.  I think everyone will agree that the experiment has been been successful on the whole, but the item level spread could do with some improvement.  We might see changes to the way the 10/25 split is handled in Cataclysm.

The second point is to remind people that a boss with more HP and damage numbers doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a harder encounter.  Does it feel more epic?  Sure.  But in terms of raw difficulty, many 10 person encounters are harder.  You can’t recover from the loss of a healer (especially if you’re only using two).  You may not have the full complement of buffs and debuffs to boost your DPS.  For a good while after WotLK released, Sartharion-3D was considered to be significantly harder on 10 than on 25.  I know a former guildie who is more proud of his “of the Nightfall” title than “Twilight Vanquisher”.

What’s driving your members to raid?  Are they in it for the loot, or for the challenge of the fights and the feeling that comes from defeating an encounter after several weeks of refining strategy and execution?  I am more proud of what my guild accomplished in Blackwing Lair (Razorgore to Nefarian in six weeks) back in patch 1.9 than I am of my experience clearing WotLK Naxxramas in three weeks.  The raid size isn’t the point here – it was learning to master things like taunt rotations on the drakes, healing teams on Chromaggus and the periodic loss of a role on Nefarian.  These were new concepts to people used to steamrolling through Molten Core, and to get together with a group of people and overcome them was very rewarding.

I haven’t really felt that same level of accomplishment since (though I am proud of what my guilds have done in WotLK).  Then again, I’ve never been in a guild that pushed hard mode content.

You may find that what people are really craving is that feeling of accomplishment rather than the high item level loot.  When I inspect someone and see item level 239 items (which can only be found in Ulduar-25 hard mode), I’m impressed moreso than people wearing item level 245 (easily obtained from Trial of the Crusader on normal).  If so, perhaps now is the time to revisit the hard modes you didn’t complete.  The extreme hard modes from older content tiers are still something to be proud of beating (though obviously less so the further you get into ICC).

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