Doing Stuff With The Guild
The atmosphere we try to create in War Machine is one of inclusion – we try and cater for all the activities people want to take part in within World of Warcraft. This includes everything from raiding (both hardcore and casual, top tier and old school raids), dungeons and achievements to PVP and creating level 1 gnomes and running around Eastern Kingdoms. Some of these things happen in a spur-of-the-moment fashion, but those that can require a bit of forward planning are generally scheduled in advance. Blizzard has provided us with an in-game calendar that can be used to schedule guild events, and War Machine uses this to make event organisation less of a headache. And in an effort to maintain some consistency with how events are handled, we’ve put together these policies. All “official” War Machine events will fit into these guidelines, and we encourage all War Machiners creating events to try and stick to them as well.
Common Characteristics
Most if not all of our raids have a few common characteristics. The primary common feature is our start and finish times – being a primarily Australian guild we start our events at 8:30pm server time and in the case of most raids finish at 10:30pm server time. Some events may run shorter depending on the requirements but it is rare that we will run longer. Events do not always start and finish at these times however so you are advised to check the times posted on the calendar event just in case.
We are a casual guild and recognise that most of us have lives outside of WoW. Because of this, we try and put events up with as much notice as possible so that people can make sure they are available for them. The invite system Blizzard has provided has a few different options with regard to responding to an invite, which will be covered in a later section.
For most events, especially raids and PVP that require good communication, we require you to be on our Discord server. If you don’t have a microphone or think your voice is so beautiful that it might distract us from the game, that’s fine. As long as you can hear us.
Weekly Events
We have a number of events that we run weekly that share a few characteristics. For now, we run regular raids on Wednesday and Thursday nights and an optional raid event Tuesdays. These nights have been known to change over time as we adjust to the schedules of our members. These three events are usually put on the calendar on Sunday evenings, so look for them from Monday morning onwards. Often the main raid (Wednesday and Thursday) are put up in 4-5 week blocks.
The standard raiding policies apply to the weekly raids, and for more information on those have a read of this excellent raiding guide right here in the Book of Knowledge.
Responding to an Invite
In Patch 3.0.2, Blizzard added the in-game calendar to World of Warcraft. The implementation has been tweaked ever since (and extended through the use of some great addons) and new features have been added, both for the better and worse (in my opinion). One of the “for the worse” additions was the option for a Tentative invite response. Not long after it’s implementation we had the situation where we had the vast majority of replies to invites as Tentative, which is not how it should be. It makes it very hard for us as raid leaders to sort out a raid when most people have given what amounts to no response to an invite.
To try and combat this, here are our guidelines on how to respond to a raid invite. There’s even a flowchart, if you’re that way inclined.
If you can (and wish to) come to the raid and can guarantee your availability (within reason), sign up (to open invitation events) or choose Accepted (for invitation only events). Obviously, things can happen beyond your control that might prevent you from attending, and we accept that.
If you want to come, but may not be unavailable due to a non-WoW commitment, then select Tentative. However. you must also send an in-game mail to the raid leader or moderator for that particular raid, or failing that one of the officers, explaining your absence. We keep everything we receive confidential, but a simple “I have a family commitment that night, will hopefully make it but not 100% sure” will suffice.
If you don’t want to come, don’t want to commit (which is perfectly acceptable, we are after all a casual guild), or have a non-WoW commitment that will definitely or highly likely prevent you from attending, do not sign up (for open invitation events) or select Declined (for invitation only events).
If you choose Tentative and do not send the raid leader a notification, then you will be considered as having not signed up or chosen Declined. Once a raid leader receives and accepts your notification, your Tentative status will be changed to Standby.