Pug Runs?

You know what a pug is, right? Pick-up-group, a group consisting of people not all from the same guild or circle of friends, a group of people most of whom you don’t know.

Pugging 5-mans happens all the time, but raid pugging is a little more delicate. Most serious guilds don’t allow their members to go pugging raids, since that means those guildies won’t be available for guild raids to that particular raid instance that week or until it resets.

A guildie of mine went pugging a Gruul’s Lair run the other day. No big deal, I would say, it’s not like my guild has done any 25-man raids for weeks, and no raid to the Lair is on the GroupCalendar for the upcoming week. It was reset the day after anyways, so even if any spontaneous Gruul runs should arise my guildie would be able to join.

What might make this a little delicate though is that apparently pugging raids have been a definite no-no, even grounds enough for a gkick, and this was an officer who was doing the pugging. I do not know if the rules have been changed recently, but its a sure-fire way to stir up guild drama by having different rules for members and officers.

My opinion only, but I think that the title of officer is associated with certain obligations as well as privileges. If you call yourself a raiding guild, the grunts of the guild expects the officers to arrange raids.

If you pug raids as an officer, you risk signalling to the rest of the guild that you are unable or unwilling to arrange these raids for the guild, because obviously you want to go there since you did, but you are not wanting it enough to make it happen for the guild, or even worse, that you really just care about the chance to get phat lewt, but you carry the guild tag with you wherever you go.

In this case, I am sure nothing of the above was intended, it was just a chance to have fun in the middle of the night after a bad guild progress run in another raid instance. Still, it sends out the wrong signals, and I think it was a rather bad call.

Last year, in the summer of 2007, we had barely started doing Karazhan on our own and had trouble getting enough people online at the same time to make the raids happen. A trial member in our guild arranged some pug runs to Kara with some of his friends from other guilds and invited some of the guild members who went along with it. I was asked to come, and hesitantly agreed, but after they found out my druid was feral and not resto I was not wanted anymore.

Just as good, actually, because at that time I was an officer in the guild and it would have felt wrong to go on pug runs in Kara when not all of our members who wanted to go were welcome. It would have felt disloyal to my guild, I was an officer and expected to make raids happen within the guild, not go outside it for raiding.

Normal members have more freedom in that aspect, but if the people in charge of the guild go off doing raids in pugs, I can't help but feel a little let down by them. I don’t want the privileges and responsibilities of being a guild officer, that’s why I left that post, but if you want it I think you’d better be prepared that its not all raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens, its a good deal of hard work and drudgery in there too.

But ah well, I don't make the rules and I don't enforce them, I keep my opinions to myself mostly since I don't want to get involved (except I write them here to get any lingering feelings of ill-ease off my chest), and I smile and move along :-)