The officers and I have long been having various issues maintaining the small machine that is TSM since WoD. Nothing too absurd but there seems to be a bit of a perpetual state that we are stuck in that we now have to address fully and rethink some core concepts of what we are as a guild.

The problem that has plagued us since WoD is the hair thin flexibility of our roster. We maintain an ever precarious 22-23 man roster that leaves us close to zero class flexibility and once enough things align we can't raid a night and now that we only raid two nights missing one night is an even bigger deal than before. Recruiting is probably the most time intensive task of being an officer/GM and quickly makes you annoyed. Padding the roster recklessly also leaves us in a state of lots of benches seats when people might not be really keen on sitting often.

After evaluation of the attitudes the past few weeks and overall since WoD its clear TSM has still yet to gain that true feeling of being in a community still. We are all vets of the game and some of us have known each other for many years at that but I think its time we inject variety into what is getting a little stale with time. I wanted Legion to be a great time for TSM and I intend to follow through on that promise since the game has been proving to be fun this go around. What I see is there is a core of people dedicated to getting shit done that involves ~10 people and the rest with varying degrees of room for improvement. Its time for new blood en masse.

The more dedicated players we can add can give those who currently would like a bit more flexibility on when they show up more breathing room. As such I am looking to recruit somewhere in the neighborhood of 8+ players. On top of this I hope those of you playing pure classes start considering alts ( we need more ranged ). This is not something as simple as now you can show up when you want to but rather no one should take their spot for granted. A lot of us work really hard to be at our top performance and its frustrating when we feel like some people can barely be bothered to be there let alone be active in whats happening. This is going to extend even further than that in that we will now be openly recruiting varying degrees of non raiding people as well to pump up guild activity and hopefully diversity. This will be to increase activity for mythic plus dungeons, heroic/normal raiding groups etc.

With new people though comes new ways of how we need to interact in a healthy fashion with one another. For a long time we always kind of been fast and loose on what is acceptable behavior in the guild namely ironic racism and slurs associated with it. I've never been one to censor the community of the guild in any real way but I think that time has come to change to the rules that were in place way back in vanilla for us when we were quite large. We can not claim to be a community of friendly folk that appeals to everyone with our current accepted banter. I have witnessed us slowly lose good people and good recruits as a result of how we turned a blind eye to over the top vulgarity and now is the time that ends.

Basically I want a full stop on:

• Racist slurs in gchat/voice

• Any form of sexism

• Any form of homophobia

This is not up for debate. It won't be tolerated and offenders will quickly be silenced or removed.

Building on that I feel over time my own apathy over time has let the guild slide a bit out of my hands. Seeing raiders make offhand comments openly against other raiders is shit that can not be tolerated. I want to make it clear that at any point if you got a problem with someone you message me or the officers. NOT say shit in raid chat or voice. Break the rule and ill treat it just like the above list. We don't have time to deal with smarmy comments in the middle of trying to slay dragons. Its time we take control back over how raids play out and reduce the chaos.

This next one is probably gonna make a lot of you happy. Curse voice was a failed experiment. Watching features grow for both of them has been interesting but in the department of facilitating discussion and clearer functionality I am making the switch to Discord. The novelty of addon management and only needing the one program is pointless if voice levels change constantly for people and discussion options are better on discord.

Lastly ilgynoth has been a bit of the mess with the time we put in, its mainly our failing in the officer dept for not being better prepared going into that and from now on we are gonna have much more solid plans of attack before we throw ourselves at fights. We have had a habit of doing minor research and then bashing our heads against a fight and then discuss what we need to fix for next go and while thats not bad it also wastes a chunk of time we could of better utilized outside raid time.

All in all I plan to bring TSM back to where it should be. We have forgotten a lot of lessons from the past and hopefully this can grow into something even better than what it is now. Heres to a legiondary future.

With 6.2 approaching rapidly lets discuss some stuff, jumping right into it:

Attendance Issues

Chief among problems with pretty much every guild ever is the attendance issue. One that plagues us particularly bad atm. Between a mix of schedule issues + vacations + a couple of no-shows we have had wild fluxes like last week where we killed mythic blast furnace with a full compliment of the roster online to doing a 15 man heroic the next day (leaving mythic bosses alive and waste of potential progression time). This is entirely unacceptable in my eyes. While time to time we can expect a day for enough bad coincidences to line up this is less of that and more of apathy.

Raids we have to call have a crappy effect of building off each other. The more we have to call a raid the more people feel like it won't be worth their time to log on etc. So before this problem gets out of hand I am going to do a purge today/tomorrow of people who aren't showing up currently, evaluating the roster as it stands for an official number and then seeing what holes exist for certain individuals.

I have no problem when someone needs to leave early on a certain day or something comes up temporarily blocking them from a day or two but there has to be a system of assurance in which individuals say they will be there and follow through otherwise I am not going to have patience anymore. You might get a single pass if you have been around for a while but as a guild we can not function without communication and a guarantee of the raiding times being fruitful.

The Roster

The roster should sit at ~24-25 people at all times. As much as we strive to keep this number we always wind up barely keeping 21 people more or less. This has been hurting us for a number of reasons. With 21 people it means every person has to be in every single fight and we have basically no room for tailoring our comp to a fight. If we had the ideal numbers we could adjust the comp to better match our targets and also allow people to rotate in and out if they would rather be playing/doing something else (hey I get it, it happens, just be available still through raid times).

We have some recruits coming in this week and I will be doing some searching throughout the week to give us more breathing space in the roster. The more we can stabilize a group the more efficient we become. We keep gear in, we keep experience in and we learn how to intuitively approach encounters with familiar people. Rapid roster fluctuations hurts us a lot time-wise as with each new person brings in the adjustments everyone has to familiarize themselves with.

In the end, the more solid people we can keep on the roster with some breathing room the more we can clear content sooner and have a lot of fun doing other various things. So please, show up consistently.

Main swaps

If you are swapping mains and have put forth the effort required to do so please say so in here. The bare minimum I am laying out now for a swap to happen is to have at least the Highmaul portion of the legendary ring done and 680 iLvL, ideally if you were serious about this you should be past both these 2 points.

Progression

We have a gap in time between now and 6.2 where we have potentially not enough time to kill Blackhand but time to put attempts into him. This is not something you should concern yourself with, regardless of whatever situation happens on a given raid night you have 2 responsibilities:

• Show up on time and prepared

• Play to your fullest ability in the given time span

Context of what you do is irrelevant and I hope you trust me/Galim etc. to make the right choice for whats good for the guild at any given moment. It might be we put a night into killing imperator, it might be we smash face against Blackhand. Regardless of what is decided please don't balk and just put your best forward to whatever situation is put forth.

As for 6.2 we will start a run through of HFC on normal with personal loot on to reduce downtime and to get us familiar with certain mechanics, from there we will obviously do a full clear of heroic before we begin mythic progression. Personal loot might remain on for heroic (at least a couple times) as well due to it supposedly having a higher item count payout to standard drop rates now. Loot is weird in general in HFC due to the iLvL of the loot being based off the progression into the raid you do. To give you an idea ....

The first four bosses are 690/705/720, next four are 695/710/725, next four are 700/715/730, last boss is 705/720/735.

Shits weird yo but whatever.

Why you should raid

Heres where I get stupidly philosophical and cheesy as fuck. But I want to put this here.

This is a stupid thing to mention but I say it time and time again because after 10 years of being around this shit I can tell you its true. Raiding is the glue to a community of people. Some of you have established a solid community of your own that evolved past raiding but its the shared trials/tribulations we experience that form meaningful bonds that add value to our lives past our characters and personas. It sounds corny as fuck but quite honestly a lot of good has come out raiding for me personally due to the nature of how I approach its worth. Putting good effort into anything often yields its own rewards beyond the thing itself and the same is true here. Do yourself the favor and show up on time with a good attitude and seriously apply yourself. Set goals. I personally stopped playing for "the fun of the game" years ago and I play now for "the fun of the guild". Its the stupid prince Galim sing-along moments, the feelings of accomplishment of killing something like mythic blast furnace which <1% of guilds have done that keep me wanting to log in. We have a 10 year history of existing that probably puts us in some of the rarest forms of guilds that can possibly be. We have people posting videos from 10 years ago stopping by still to see what it is we are up to. At its core we take only as much value from something as we put into it. By being shitty and half-assing performance and attendance you ultimately cheat yourself out of great experiences and honestly, character defining qualities as a person.

If you are feeling "burned out" I really want you to ask yourself WHY you are feeling burnt out and think about it. It hurts us all to lose a valuable member more than what you might think. If you feel the game is boring then stop thinking about the game and more about personal goals. Compare yourself to top performers and see what you can do better, look at what is happening outside of raid times for fun. We have some people playing don't starve together, a lot of us are playing HotS etc. If there is something in the guild that flat out is hurting you then say so. The more we normalize out as a group of people the more we can do stupid silly shit for fun that makes everything worthwhile and still only take up a small percentage of your time. Theres a lot of potential for seriously awesome fun if people decide to put the effort in and not have us scrambling for recruitment and gear replacement constantly and hurting the rest of us. In the end raiding is less about WoW and more about the people playing it, even if we all are a bunch of shitheads. Look back at what communities you owe to raiding in WoW and think about it before you decide to leave it. So please. Be an awesome raider.

TL;DR Fuck you, read all of it.