About Imperative
What are the goals of Imperative?
Imperative’s goal is to develop and maintain an extremely skilled group of individuals that raid on the leading edge of 25man hardmode content. Our raid schedule is very small to allow our members to enjoy the multiple facets of WoW, ranging from 10mans to eventual rated battlegrounds. While we started raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, our primary focus is being competitive in Cataclysm.
What are Imperative’s guild motto’s?
- “We do not tolerate poor play.” A major part of our guild philosophy is that WoW is a very easy game. The mental cognition required to succeed in WoW is significantly less when compared to other competitive games. As a result, we expect all raiders to be on the ball all the time. We mean it when we say that we kick the baddies.
- “No excuses, play like a champion.” This is somewhat used as a joke, but it has a serious undertone too. We don’t listen to excuses as to why something did or did not happen. We want all of our players to play like champions all the time.
What are your raid times?
Imperative raids 25mans on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 8:30pm until Midnight EST.
Do you ever raid past those times or on different days?
We never initiate a pull past Midnight. Our philosophy is that after three and a half hours of sitting in front of a computer late at night, your mental sharpness is just plummeting. We use up all of our raid time, but we don’t go after. We raid 10mans and conduct premade battleground groups on the weekends. We also have a guild meeting on the last Monday of every month.
How did Imperative get started?
In early December, a group of RL friends and PvP partners were scattered across several servers. The group transferred to Zul’jin-Alliance with the initial goal of PvP’ing together. In mid-December, the group started Imperative with the goal of being a skilled hardmode raiding guild that enjoyed the multiple facets of World of Warcraft. Imperative is an original guild – we’re not a break off from someone else thinking “we can do it better.” We recruited over the winter holidays and started raiding January 5th.
What’s Imperative’s guild structure?
Blacksen is the GM of Imperative and has the title of Executor. The officers have the title of Council and assist in recruitment and raid management as well as giving their opinions on loot and guild decisions. Under officers are Raiders which represent the core raiding aspect of the guild. After Raiders, we have Initiates (more details below) and Guild Friends. Guild Friend spots are reserved for people who either previously raided with us or have significant ties to multiple people in the guild. The Guild Friend rank is conditional upon maintaining a positive relationship with the both the Imperative and Zul’jin community – we will not tolerate guild friends trashing our guild tag in any way.
What’s Imperative’s initiate process?
When joining the raiding roster of Imperative, you are viewed as a complete equivalent to Raiders. You have the same priority for raid spots and can still recieve gear. The “Initiate” tag is just a flag so that people can see that you’re new and can get to know you. Initiates frequently recieve gear after proving that they can meet the attendance and basic performance requirements. Typically initiates are promoted anywhere from 3-6 weeks after the invitation.
What’s the server like?
Zul’jin is a high population server with a very high average skill level. While the server has a significant leaning towards the Horde side, the Alliance is very strong. There are 3-4 ToC 25 PuGs each day, with a lot of ICC 25 PuGs that down Saurfang and some ToGC 10 PuGs that down Anub’arak. The auction house has medium to high prices, but there’s almost never a shortage of anything relevant to raiding – you can always get a flask or a gem at a reasonable price. Due to the extremely old battlegroup, Zul’jin is sometimes a victim of Tuesday’s lag. The lag can be frustrating at times, but isn’t devastating (we still go 9/12+ on Tuesdays). Also, the Alliance rarely have Wintergrasp control. There’s a Horde PvP guild that usually dominates the zone, causing the Alliance to only have access to Archavon 5-6 times a week.
What does the guild do outside of raids?
The guild is extremely alive outside of raids, usually having 20+ people online on any non-raid night. On off nights, we usually raid old instances, 10mans, and premade Battlegrounds. All of these activities are completely optional, but overall, most people here really enjoy multiple facets of WoW.
What’s Imperative’s loot system?
Imperative uses loot council to distribute all 25man gear drops. Our loot council makes decisions purely based on impact, which we define as what is going to get us the most progression the fastest. There are several major factors that are considered:
- Attendance: How often you show up to raid, expected to be above 80% over the past 4 weeks of raiding.
- Reliability: If you’re not going to make it to a raid, you must post about it on our forums.
- Performance: If your performance leaves us skeptical to the point we’re unsure about your future in progression raiding, you won’t get gear.
- “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”: We obviously want everyone to get gear, and so we try to spread it around pretty evenly.
- Size of Upgrade: Obviously the bigger the upgrade, the more impact it has to the guild.
- Out of guild commitment: Players who take it upon themselves to improve their character outside of scheduled raiding will be rewarded. Examples include crafting gear or running 10mans.
- Upcoming fights: As an example, if our healer sector needs more gear for an upcoming progression fight then we’ll usually gear healers when there exist gear conflicts.
Whenever the officers feel that two or more people are equally qualified, we use a system that randomly gives it away. We also track all attendance and loot decisions through our website, found by clicking the “Attendance” tab on the main page.
What’s about vanity items?
Because vanity items offer no impact to the guild’s overall progression, we do not include them in the loot council. Instead, we allow members to roll for vanity items that they want. However, we also include seniority and fairness in how vanity items are random’d off. As a general rule, a member must have been in the guild for at least two months before being allowed to roll on any vanity item. In addition, members can only win one vanity item every six months. If you win a vanity item, you won’t be allowed to roll again until either all members have obtained one or six months have passed. Lastly, we want to keep vanity items in the guild. Selling vanity items inside the guild is acceptable and will still count as your win. Selling vanity items outside the guild, however, is unacceptable unless permitted by officers.
What’s Imperative’s atmosphere like?
The best way to describe our atmosphere is that we’re a serious group of college raiders. We joke around on trash and we have tons of fun outside the guild. We expect people to conduct themselves with a sense of professionalism, and as such we do not tolerate blatant racism in any way. We don’t have people going “yo waz fuckin up niggs” when they log on in guild chat. The leadership is extremely professional during raids but likes to have fun afterwards.
What does the leadership do when someone’s screwing up?
- If someone is consistently underperforming over multiple raid nights, the officers will pull them aside outside of raids and tell them that their performance is lacking. Should their performance not significantly improve, they’ll get removed from the raiding roster. As mentioned earlier, the officers are very professional and courtaeous – it’s nothing personal.
- If someone is having a “bad night” in raiding, they’ll likely get replaced for the remainder of the raid. Usually, the officers are pretty quick to make roster adjustments whenever individual raiders aren’t adapting to a new mechanic.
- For individual screw-ups, there’s always some sort of scolding. If you get hit by Malleable Goo on Putricide, an officer will immediately call out “so and so, that was bad,” even if you don’t die or the goo has no consequence. We will NOT yell at you about it, nor will we call you stupid or anything. We believe in “hating the sin, not the sinner.” Thus whenever we call someone out, we address the action as being the mistake, not the person. Just because you make a mistake in a game doesn’t make you any less of a person.