Playing on my mage a bit, I was struck by an advertisement for Cross-Realm recruitment coming from the Draenor (EU) Guild The Scourge. Since it was the first time I heard one of these in-game, I pestered the advertisemer for an interview.
Docmortuus, GM of The Scourge, was graceful enough to spare a bit of his time discussing this initiative.
Draenor, while not as famous as Magtheridon, still has a very healthy endgame raiding activity, with BT and MH cleared on horde - In fact their most progressed guild takes exactly the 100th EU WowJutsu rank (out of more than 18k EU raiding guilds), 32 guilds past Gruul, and a grand total of 81 guilds having set foot into the TBC endgame so far. While transfer is commonplace for the top brass, Docmortuus is running what I refer to as a second-tier guild - Gruul is finished and they are now working through SSC and TK.
Now I don’t have the pretense of having done enough research to verify whether the notions I had concerning pre-TBC raid progression is still more or less valid, but I suspect they are still in a similar bind - the top players get leeched off (now x-realm too) to the tier 1 guilds, and recruiting from tier 3 guilds is causing issues of their own. At any rate, The Scourge is recruiting 3 good players, and since one of their applicants came from my own server, Doomhammer, and Docmortuus wasn’t lucky catching him online so far, it gave him the idea of doing in-game advertisement.
He had been at it for just two days so far, so no real measure of whether this could actually be successful (on top of forum-based recruitment) or not, but he plans to keep at it for a while, also extending his recruitment to another server in the same battlegroup, from which a couple of solid transferees have come.
At the time of talking to him, he hadn’t really given thoughts yet to whether expand his advertisement to different and younger battlegroups (Draenor is part of Blackout, which holds EU’s oldest servers), so there isn’t (yet) any specific plans around recruiting the generally most experienced player versus newer ones.
While advertising for x-realm guild recruitment certainly is new to me, and it’s way too early to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of this, it certainly resonates with Rohan of Blessing of King’s thoughts about Paid Character Transfers and its effects on the top tier raiding guilds. On the tier just below the top brass, finding new blood to keep progressing remains, as ever, a very high priority. While PCT may eventually lead to too much concentration on a limited set of servers, it is also a chance and an opportunity for the tier two guilds to keep their ranks active.
As an aside, Docmortuus also confirmed one of my other theories regarding TBC raiding, namely that the introduction of the 10-men funnel leading to 25-men raiding did wreak havoc with a lot of established pre-TBC raiding guilds. My previous main warlock was on Draenor herself, so we chatted a bit regarding good old times. Matter of fact, many of the old names I was familiar with had had their share of troubles, and some only recently recovered.
That being said, my thanks to Docmortuus for spending the time to answer my questions. I certainly wish him and The Scourge the best of luck with their raiding and recruiting endeavours, and if you play on EU PvE Servers and think you have what it takes, start by checking out their Statement of Purpose and then see if they are recruiting your class.
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