It's story time! Today's story: JD and the Whack-a-Mole Raid!
I transferred to Gilgamesh in April to join a bunch of old friends from my CL days after my stint in the top FC on Hyperion ended. I decided once I got over here and saw there weren't any raid slots in my new FC I was interested in to make my own group. I grabbed a friend of mine and a SCH in the FC in need of a group who said they had a PLD friend who needed one as well, and we started up.
Soon after I grabbed a couple of other people from the FC who I knew of but had never had any contact with - everyone who'd ever talked about them said they were great people (and they are) so I was super excited. I went on to tell our SCH only to find out that he'd decided he was just going to start his own group (gave a bunch of bullshit answers to my questioning), so back down to 4 we went. That's ok, I thought, we had me on DRG, the two I'd picked up were SMN/BRD, and my friend was WAR - it'd be rough recruiting, but I could easily pick up PLD/SCH/WHM/MNK, right? Soon after I started my delightful ad campaign. I managed to snag a PLD who came with his own set of healers. Bonus! I grabbed a MNK soon after and we went off on our first raid night.
We're missing our PLD when we start, so we decide to do T10 farm instead of the T12 prog. Things are pretty shaky due to some tanking issues caused by rust. Our healers refuse to join us on TS, and then when the PLD finally shows up tell him we have "communication issues". Already I want to kick them, but I want to keep them going for now and see if they shape up. The tank seems like a cool guy. Afterwards, he says he needs to talk to his healers then basically tells us that they've decided to stay but are putting conditions on it. I decide to give them one more night to see what happens. Next day, they've left the raid linkshell and the group and took the monk with them.
So back down to 4/8 again, I decide I'm going to swing over to WHM instead of playing DRG. Grab a SCH who seems pretty cool, grab a PLD with no experience who seems to have a good attitude, grab a couple of melees who seem chill and things go from there. We go to go in last night, the PLD is missing, and our WAR is out of game time. So we grab a couple of PUG tanks and 2-shot T12 (we had 3 people without clears) with almost no difficulty.
Spending today recruiting new tanks. Grabbed a PLD that looks promising but we'll see what happens when we get in there.
Remember kids, it's not about finding the best players, it's about finding good, reliable people.