Our system for raid invites is the result of the purpose and principles for the Lexington guild. So first we'll review what Lexington is all about and what we're trying to accomplish. Then we'll discuss the raid invite system, and how it is designed to achieve these goals.


Lexington Mission

Fun, casual raiding with strong progress in 25 man content while respecting real life.

Performance matters
We are a group of excellent, skilled players who are dedicated to conquering the hardest content Warcraft has to offer. Lexington expects every raider to continuously improve their game skills and manage their raiding characters. This should be a learning environment: we don't expect perfection, but we expect players to stay up to date on their class. Warcraft is constantly changing, there are always new things to learn. This is also not a solo game, we're a team. By performing well, you demonstrate respect for the other people in the guild and strengthen the guild.

If you are struggling or under-performing, we will try to help you improve. Everyone's contribution is important.

Real life first
At the same time, we want Warcraft to be a fun game. We don't want the game to turn into a job. The fastest way to make the game not fun is to put pressure on people to raid when real life priorities come up. We don't want to be a guild where anyone feels like they can't take a vacation, enjoy a family event, get together with friends, or take time to recover when sick. We want to raid with healthy, fun people, not WoW machines.

Progress and quality raids
We want a guild that can guarantee consistent raids year round while pushing new content. In this regard, Lexington has been the most successful guild on the server for years. We have very few gaps in our raiding history, and we want to maintain that. Canceling raids hurts momentum and progress. Every raid should be full strength, building on the progress we've made before.


So what does that mean for raid invites?

Our goal is progression, so we built a progession-focused raid invite system. We want a guild of strong players who are able to take nights off if necessary while making sure every single raid night is a success.

Lexington policies are:

• 75% attendance from players
• 75% minimum target for raid invites
• Stronger players will tend to get extra invites for progression fights (see FAQ #1)

In practice, players with good attendance and good performance end up with around 80-90% raid invite averages.

Everyone gets benched sometimes.


FAQ:

What counts as progession content?

Progression fights are the difficult fights that we are currently working on. Progression fights include difficult normal encounters (Yogg, Vezax when we first got there) and many hard/heroic mode fights. Progression fights do NOT include hard/heroic fights that we have on farm. Easy mode fights are never progression (except for Yogg difficulty encounters).

Icecrown normal is not progression content. (Arthas might be, we'll see.)


How big has Lexington been? Isn't it way too big now?

We primarily track the size of the guild based on how many raiders we bench each night. We also consider whether we're able to consistently assemble an appropriate group for each fight.

• In BT/Sunwell, we regularly benched 4-9 people.
• In Naxx, we were nicely sized. If I recall correctly, we benched 4-6 raiders.
• From April 09 to July 09, (Ulduar), we were on the edge of being too small. This slowed progression on a few nights, but generally we were able to put together a solid group each night. We benched 0-4 people a night.
• From August 09 to Sept 09 (beginning Crusader Coliseum), we benched 3-5 raiders. We started out with a good size resulting from August recruiting when the rest of the guilds on the server crashed.
• From Sept 09 to Nov 09 (Crusader Coliseum) we were between 3 players short and benching 2. For a wide variety of reasons, we lost a lot of regular raiders. There were not enough players available to put together good raid groups. We canceled a number of raids, brought guards, and were unable to substitute raiders in and out when we needed to. This stunted our progress.

The perfect balance allows us to meet or exceed the Lexington invite policy, while having enough players to guarantee a full strong raid every single night.

Right now, benching 4-5 people a night is about right. Any less and we'd be occasionally canceling raids or bringing guards.

Also note: We currently have more guards and guard alts than we've had in a long time. If you get online for a raid and see 40 people online, there may be 10+ non-raiders around.


Why not bring the best 25 people online every night?

Carefully consider the effects:
True, we might kill a particular boss slightly earlier. The best players would see slightly more invites than they do under our current system, and might gear up slightly faster.

However...
The 'lesser performing' players would receive greatly reduced invites. They would then be demoralized, under-geared, less experienced, and less prepared. They would have less opportunity to improve and practice. They would be much more likely to quit.
Then, when any of the 'better players' are out, we'd be bringing a poor substitute instead of another strong player. Or we might not have anyone available because they all quit.

Furthermore, a merit-based invite system has these effects:

• unhealthy and miserable competition to see who is "good enough" to make the invite list
• focus on pointing out other people's mistakes instead of cooperating
• focuses raiders on meters instead of on killing bosses
• officers have to decide who is better than who. This would cause us endless arguments and drama.
  (Note: we certainly have ideas about stronger and weaker raiders, but we don't rank everyone in order.)

We do not feel the advantages of a merit-based invite system are worth the costs. We have a progession-focused raid invite system which is primarily designed to consistently conquer hard content, not a system that is designed to "reward" the most skilled players.


Does being benched at the start of a raid mean I should just sign off for the night?

No, although you certainly have that option. We need benched players to stay available** as substitutes so that we can quickly swap you in and keep the raid going with minimal interruption if we lose a person from the raid.

Being benched on backup is a critical part of supporting the raid, and we reward this with full dkp for each boss killed and for dismissal.

** "Available" includes being on an alt or even just on vent, as long as we can get you if we need to sub you in. If we can't reach you, then you aren't benched, and you'll lose your benched dkp. You can go afk as long as you tell your plans to the officer handling benched. We're quite reasonable, really. (It is very frustrating to officers to have 6 people on the benched list, losing a raider to a legitimate emergency, and having ZERO of the 'benched' people be reachable. This wastes everyone's time while officers scramble to find anyone who can fill in.)


Doesn't getting benched hurt my ability to gear up?

In the long run, no. To start with, you get the same dkp while you are on the bench as someone in the raid.

Second, if one of your many upgrades drops when you are not in the raid and someone else gets it, you will still have the dkp you would have spent to use on another upgrade in the future. In the long term, it comes out even.

We need all raiders to be well geared.


But I'm really good! Why am I benched?

We're glad you're awesome, and officers definitely notice! You'll get to participate extra on progression fights, and hence have a better chance at guild-first kills. However, if we took you every time, there would be less opportunity for 'lower skilled' players to gear up and learn fights. Then you would be stuck with some inexperienced and unimproved raiders on those progression fights.

Everyone gets benched sometimes.


Am I stuck with these rules?

No! If you have an idea for how to do things better we'll make the change or add your suggestion. We've already gotten good comments and suggestions from many non-officers. Please contribute to make the guild better!