New server, new faction, new starts, same ol' Dimensional Death

[Ayasu]

Hey guys.

So, no doubt some of you are wondering what's up with the faction/server change we mentioned the other night. I wanted to let everyone know that the decided change will be to Arthas-Horde.

If you'd like to do your own, quick number's comparison, check here:

Arthas@WowProgress

Elune@WowProgress


Now, there are many reasons for this. This server wasn't just picked with an RNG and the faction with a coin toss. There was hours and hours of research, debating, and discussions between me, Laude and Ox over what would be the best move for our guild.

First, some history about why
Dimensional Death is on Elune to begin with, along with a history of the rollercoaster that's been our recruiting predicament for 2 years.

Back in 2008, at the end of BC, shortly before Wrath came out, a friend of mine convinced me to come play WoW, casually. I made the climb to 70, from like... 50-something, and did my first raid(Kara) and... had alot of fun. And that's the entire reason we came to this server to begin with.

Now, back then, I didn't really know or care about high pop, faction(still don't, really), low pop, raiding, etc. I had a group, we did well, and things were good. And they were good all through Wrath. And even the first tier of Cata. We finished Wrath ranked top10 in 10mans on the server. Coming from where a bunch of us did on FFXI(THE top Sky guild on Phoenix), I was giddy. I'm not a cutting edge raider by any means, but I do quite like sitting close to the top. I'm used to it -- I don't like being the bottom of the barrel. &
quot;Dimensional What?" wasn't a feeling I enjoyed.

In Firelands, I felt the full effects of our server's declining population. Drama happened. I lost most of my raiders over stupid shit. And for 2 months I tried rebuilding, before giving up and taking a break. We made a comeback at the end of Cata, in DS, and cleared the raid, but that was mostly due to the help of old, old raiders coming back over 'cause they were bored. :/ We finished the guild's first legendary, and I felt like things were on an upswing.

Fast forward to MOP. We start pushing MV10. Progression looks solid. We're getting bosses down fairly quickly, and before Christmas, we're in a decent spot on progression(we were top20 on the server at one point).

Then it fell apart. It was Firelands all over again. Revolving door roster, retention was stupid hard, and some of the people we DID get were sub-par, or needed alot of work and couldn't master little things like fight
mechanics. Back in December we were talking about leaving the server if things didn't get a big up-swing.

We waited 3 months. 3 months of repair bills, wasted time, frustration and nerd rage. We couldn't down the EASIEST boss in Throne. We can't beat an encounter we have full understanding of the mechanics of.

So, now that I've bored you all with a history lesson, here's the reason why we chose Arthas-Horde.

There were a number of factors as to why we chose the way we did. I'll break it down.

1) POPULATION

Elune is a Low-Medium Pop server, and it shows. There are 3-4 "big" guilds that have taken almost every raider on the server. This makes it IMPOSSIBLE to recruit without getting people to transfer over.

One thing that people look at when transferring to a new server to raid is the population of the server. The population on Elune is abysmal
A paltry 4k 90s, mostly on Alliance, and realistically, that's only a few hundred people, likely. At any given time, when you're in town, trade goes by at a snails pace, there're no PUGs, no one shouts to do anything but troll... It's boring.

We looked at servers with at least a 6k+ population of 90s. Arthas was sitting at 8.7k+ at the time of this writing. That's a high enough population to give us a better raiding environment without worrying about there being a queue to log in.

2) RAIDING SCENE

Elune has a very weak raiding scene. It's not competitive, three guild hold most of the raiders, and recruitment is impossible.

Arthas's raiding scene seems very strong. There are alot of people there, which means there are more people to pull from for raiding spots.

Not a whole lot to elaborate on, here.

3) PLAYER QUALITY

Now, I
know this is subjective to opinion, but...

We all know that Elune's general population are a bunch of mouthbreathers who can't stand out of the fire. Yes, I know every server has these. Yes I know this is a "Grass is greener" point. However, everyone I've talked to on Arthas, so far, seem like competent people that can at the very least hold conversations and spell correctly. Most of the people on Elune do their rotations by rolling their face over their keys -- and it shows when you talk them as well.

4) COMMUNITY

Everyone on Elune hates each other. No one can deny that. There's alot of hostility in trade chat, even when someone asks a simple question. The community on Arthas seems to be a bit better. I'd say that this is because there are a larger pool of people to talk to that aren't 12 year old and disgruntled raiders.

5) RECRUITMENT

This
is the big one. We know this is fact: Recruiting on Elune is balls. It's almost impossible to get someone raiders in-server, and no one wants to transfer to this backwater server because the community and economy are bad.

Simply, Arthas has a much larger pool of people to choose from, and it will be easier to recruit.

6) FACTION

As for the faction change... well, when in Rome, right?

It's a Horde-pop server, much like how Elune is an Alliance-pop server. Yes, it's PvP, but there's enough of a server imbalance that I HIGHLY doubt it'll have much of an impact.

"But I don't wanna get ganked!" you say? Make friends -- the idea is that we will have an open recruitment for the guild, specifically recruiting raiders, casuals and PvPers.

PLANS GOING FORWARD

We're going to do our best to hit Arthas in force. I was to assert
a presence there ASAP -- build up and run. This means a few things:

Rank Restructure
We'll be re-doing the ranks, again, to facilitate a roster of raiders, casuals, and PvPers.

Bank Changes
We'll be changing bank permissions, tabs, etc.

Open Recruitment
For a brief time, anyone going over with us will have GInvite permissions. This is to ensure that anytime there's someone who you want to invite, can be. The lowest rank(Scootaloo) doesn't have any bank permissions, so it'll be fine to invite willy-nilly, since there's nothing that they can procure from the bank.

RBG Team
Ara and Dem have volunteered to step up and create an RBG team. This team will be run by them, and will have it's own rules(TBD)


"So, when're we moving?!" Right now, I have a support ticket in to try to free up a good number of names for our characters on the new server. Once that
ticket is answered and we're able to get those names reserved, we'll be headed over.

Keep an eye on the Facebook group for more information as to when that's gonna happen. If you guys have any questions, please post them here, in this thread, so that the entire leadership can address them(Ox is anti-social-networking and refuses to get a Facebook acct).