Like I said earlier, my guild is casual/raiding pve. People in-game often ask me, “What is casual/raiding?” So I thought I would answer on my anonymous blog and then never link to it.
Our casual/raiding guild runs five-man normals and heroics with ease. We’re capable of doing any level of content. We laugh when instances get nerfed, and we’re laughing right now when we hear people complain about how hard the new Magister’s Terrace instance is. Our sweet spot as a guild is the small raid content, which in vanilla WoW was Zul’Gurub and AQ20, and now is Karazhan and Zul’Aman. Smaller raids are the right balance of management/reward.
Our guild can never seem to top that crest of enough people to raid the largest level of content. This (mostly) doesn’t stress us out, although of course it’s different from person to person. Back in the day, we took 28 to Molten Core, and stuck with it until we had success. I don’t think we’re stubborn enough to do that again. We’ve tried out 19 in Gruul, wiped a bunch, shook our head and walked away. Other people have written at length about the strange guild hierarchy that happens due to the most development time being put into large-group raids. We’re happy where we are.
Our guild’s recruitment is passive and constant. People who want to learn endgame from scratch start here and then leave, some kindly and some unkindly. We have people who have left who we’re still friends with. We’ve had cliques splinter off to form their own guilds. We keep recruiting despite the overhead and energy lost, because every now and then we find a person who is a perfect match for what we’re about, and they find that this is exactly what they’ve been looking for, just like my wife and I did. And then we become friends to laugh with and play this game with. It’s a good system.
We don’t give people a hard time when they go on vacation, or when they want a break from raiding. We also have guild members who have no intention of ever raiding. People haven’t given me and my wife a hard time when our family expanded and our playtime has permanently decreased. Our guild is friendly. People are more important than raid progression. Casual. But the time that we do spend together online, we work to be the best group that we can. Raiding.
That’s casual/raiding. It’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for us.