My raid group has hit a virtual wall over the last few weeks, and I’m struggling with trying to figure out why. Is it because of the holidays? Is everyone more interested in playing with the new patch 3.3 toys? Is it me? Could it be me?!? Well, it has to be something because we are stuck.

Not only are we not accomplishing our goals for the night, we’ve been unable to successfully fill out a complete raid of ten players. We’ve had a couple of new folks join us recently, and I assumed that the new blood would invigorate our group and allow us to push forward. However, just the opposite has happened; we’ve slowed down, almost to a complete halt. Here is a list of reasons why I think we’re not able to progress, but I don’t have a good solution to combat these issues.

Farming Emblems: A Raid vs. LFD

Prior to patch 3.3, geared players could be enticed to run older raids because they were deemed as good sources for emblems. Nowadays, I think it’s more time-efficient to chain-run random heroic dungeons. My raid team runs for only two hours and can realistically only clear two wings of Naxxramas in that time frame. That’s only six or seven emblems per player. I’ve timed some of my recent heroic dungeon runs, and they take about forty minutes each (yes, I know, I go too slow). If one of those heroics is the daily, you could accumulate nine to fifteen Emblems of Triumph, and two Emblems of Frost in the same time frame. Of course, this assumes that one of those random dungeons is not the Oculus.

Stale Content is Stale

With each patch, the older content becomes less and less desirable. Despite Blizzard’s best efforts, players aren’t interested in regularly running Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum, Ulduar, and the first couple of bosses in Vault of Archavon. Unless the player knows with absolute certainty that the raid group will be able to faceroll through the dungeon, it’s not interesting. Now, one would think that a challenge would be enough to engage players, but, in my experience, it’s just the opposite with World of Warcraft.

I’m going to be implementing my own rewards system this week, offering up some of my crafting services to players that attend our events for the week. I’m hoping that this small incentive will keep everyone intrigued enough to show up and complete the raid. If not, there’s not much I can do to make the content more interesting than it already is… or isn’t.

A Wider Gear Discrepancy

A new patch brings us many things: new dungeons, quests, content, bosses, and horrible frame-rate lag. More than anything else, though, we’re showered with multiple tiers of new gear. Unless you can control how everyone in your raid plays when you’re not raiding with them, players are going to gear up in different ways. Some players can play all the time, and may raid with multiple groups. Others may mix up their allocated play times with heroic dungeons. Other players may only log in for your raid — and your raid only — for their source of gear.

This will continue to be problematic because the difference between your geared-out players and your weakest links will force you to make some tough decisions. If you try to incorporate older content, the players with all the gear will stop showing up. If you cater to the gear-score winners, you have to start excluding players… players that rely on your raid group for experience, loot, and, quite possibly, fun.

Planning

All of the above is making it a real chore to plan and coordinate raids. You certainly can’t please everyone all of the time, but I’m finding it difficult to even please some of the people some of the time. You know me, I’m all about pleasure, but I’ve been feeling a lot of frustration trying to schedule events that make the most sense for my group, and deal with holiday schedules at the same time. I’ve put a lot of effort into organizing this raid group, and don’t want to go on a hiatus. I want to be able to make the event interesting enough for players that play all the time, and enjoyable for new players just starting out. A challenging balance, I know, but it has to be possible. Right?