Manditory Attendance Poll

[Biostar Solarwinds]

We are on the DKP system and your required to keep a 75% attendance on raids. Fall below that and you become inactive and unable to go in on loot. The addage of if your online during raiding hours your required to raid applies to us as well. We only raid 3 nights a week for those whom have busy scheduals or family. I find myself fortunate to be able to relax on off nights to do tradeskills or exping.

[Jatrulak]

Our raiding isn't necessarily mandatory. We're supposed to and expected to raid whenever it is called.
   We use officer awarded loot system based on when you last won, how many raids you've been on etc. so if you want any chance at loot, you'll want to be raiding.
   The fact that if our leader catches you online and you're not raiding(We use a raid organization through a channel, no particular guild..yet) is also a big reason for you to be raiding if online as she'll mentally note it and consequences will follow if this happens too many times with you, IE Kicked out.
   So maybe this is required, maybe it isn't../shrug

[Rugom Razorclaw]

In my previous guild which is top on server, attendance while online was mandatory. 70% raid attendance per month was needed to be able to bid normally on items.  Raids were every day, unless not enough people were on.

Large reason why I no longer play eq.

[Toln]

I've been on both sides of the fence, been apart of a guild that has no mandatory raiding, and one that does.

There are a lot of pros and cons to it.

For the "family" guild, we did not require members to be at raids. We were slowly progressing to EPs. "casual raiding" if you will, even though we raided 5 days a week.
Now I used to think this was great, and that it was an awesome policy we had in place, but realised soon that I was wrong.
The biggest problem we had was that some people would refuse to show up for raids when they knew a backflagging target was coming up, making it near impossible to make any progression in the game since we could only hit the big targets 1 day of the week. IE: Selfishness. Even though most of the guild showed up regardless, all it took was a few prime classes deciding they didn't want to be bothered with backflagging to not attend to be the cause of the raid being called off.
On a brighter note though, people could take breaks from raiding if they were getting burned out or needed a break.

For the Mandatory raid guild, people had to come to raids when they were called or they would lose DKP. This worked much better since the selfish people couldn't just run off and do other things while we were raiding. Instead, they just wouldn't log on when a backflagging target would come up. Heh. Admittedly it wasn't as big a problem as in the previous guild, but still..

IMO, the best way for a guild looking to reach Time and beyond is a system like this:
1) Mandatory raiding, if you're on, you're there.
2) Target is called at raid time, not before, so nobody knows what it will be.
3) Raid attendance must meet a certain % criteria to be able to bid on items, as someone mentioned already, to prevent people not logging on for raid time if a backflag target is up. (Or another method, awarding extreme DKP bonuses to backflag targets to encourage people to show up)

Loot awarding (god loots/merit system) based on raid attendance % also seems to work pretty well imo, but i'm not a fan of that since no matter how fair a person tries to be, they can never be entirely accurate in the distribution of loot to people.

[seamusmc]

If you are online and the guild is raiding you must raid.

This goes for my guild as well.

[seamusmc]

The biggest problem we had was that some people would refuse to show up for raids when they knew a backflagging target was coming up, making it near impossible to make any progression in the game since we could only hit the big targets 1 day of the week. IE: Selfishness. Even though most of the guild showed up regardless, all it took was a few prime classes deciding they didn't want to be bothered with backflagging to not attend to be the cause of the raid being called off.
On a brighter note though, people could take breaks from raiding if they were getting burned out or needed a break.

For the Mandatory raid guild, people had to come to raids when they were called or they would lose DKP. This worked much better since the selfish people couldn't just run off and do other things while we were raiding. Instead, they just wouldn't log on when a backflagging target would come up. Heh. Admittedly it wasn't as big a problem as in the previous guild, but still..

IMO, the best way for a guild looking to reach Time and beyond is a system like this:
1) Mandatory raiding, if you're on, you're there.
2) Target is called at raid time, not before, so nobody knows what it will be.
3) Raid attendance must meet a certain % criteria to be able to bid on items, as someone mentioned already, to prevent people not logging on for raid time if a backflag target is up. (Or another method, awarding extreme DKP bonuses to backflag targets to encourage people to show up)

Loot awarding (god loots/merit system) based on raid attendance % also seems to work pretty well imo, but i'm not a fan of that since no matter how fair a person tries to be, they can never be entirely accurate in the distribution of loot to people.

I've been in 3 guilds through the years and the selfish people not showing up hurt every one of them. I understand its common across all high end guilds. Currently we are getting screwed by our clerics as we try to get thru Uqua. It's a tough challenge that is taking us much longer then it should because the clerics only want to raid in Time. We are in a good race with one other guild to be first in Qvic on the server but the GoD expansion really has hurt our enrollment.

I like the idea of requiring a percentage of raid attendance affecting a player's ability to bid, but for my guild's situation it really wouldn't help. The key people we need won't log in regardless.