When to call it quits

My guild ran Heroic Naxxramas again Friday and Saturday. Friday was the best raid ever, clearing all of Arachnid and Plague Quarters, and 2/3 of Military Quarter. Tons of loot was distributed, and I even ended up with the best-in-slot (if you aren't hit-capped) belt in the game: [Torn Web Wrapping].

Then we ran it again on Saturday. Boy, what a disaster. It took us three hours to kill the last "boss" in Military, the Four Horsemen. Then after another hour of wiping on Patchwerk, we reached our pre-arranged quit time, midnight, and called it.

When I logged in on Sunday, I saw that a number of people had quit the guild, leaving apparently no parting message. One of them said he was looking for a guild that could progress farther in content, and the other said he was just frustrated with the progression, which I guess means the same thing in the end.

Now, our constant wiping on Saturday may not have led directly to the mass exodus on Sunday, but I have to think it's related. People had to have gotten tired, and bored, and frustrated.

It's funny that nobody said anything to me about it in the raid. It's funny that some of them are still unguilded, and others ended up in very small guilds that can't possibly run 25-man content. That doesn't seem to me like someone who's heading for "greener pastures" (i.e. a guild that will progress further).

To make matters worse, one of them took our guild's 10-man raid ID and pugged Naxxramas without our permission, only to wipe at Kel'Thuzad.

So it got me thinking about the title of this post. When do you call a raid? Normally my problem is wanting to go further. Being on a roll and saying "just one more boss, just one more chance at loot". When you're in a five-man group you can just ask them and they'll either agree to do it or not. But when you're leading a 25-man group, you can't expect everyone to speak up. There will be plenty of people who are getting tired, or sore, and want to be done, but are staying in for the good of the group.

This is why we have precise ending times. No matter how close we are to killing a boss, when the end time hits, we stop right then. If we're currently engaged in a battle with a boss, we'll finish that fight, and then call it, but otherwise we call it right at the end time.

But until this weekend I didn't think we needed the option of calling it early. Now I'm convinced we do. In retrospect, I should have ended the raid after the third or fourth attempt at the Four Horsemen. No, we wouldn't have gotten our T7 chest tokens, but we also wouldn't have had a bunch of tired, frustrated raiders wondering just what the hell they were doing sitting at a computer for four hours and spending hundreds of gold for repairs.

We've made some changes in our guild runs as a result of this past weekend. We're going to restart 10-man weekday raids. And we're going to limit 25-man raiding to just one day a week. If we can't clear Naxxramas in four hours, then too bad. Four hours is all the time we'll take. That's a long commitment to ask of our members, but it's all I'm willing to do ask at this point. I don't want to drive away any more members with raids like this past Saturday's raid.

That was just a disaster.