Raid cancelled due to low turn out

Oh dear. I was signed for the Karazhan raid on Thursday which was due to start at Attumen, as healer-specced, but because we only had 9 signups, the raid was cancelled. The Bear, our venerated raid leader, has made the ruling that if we don't have enough sign ups by the time the raid list goes up, the raid gets cancelled. This is to avoid pestering people in guild chat to fill slots; we aren't a raiding guild so we don't pressure anyone to raid and it was felt that such pestering was causing pressure and potentially problems. That and the Bear was pestered solidly during work to cancel raids and finally relented and made such a rule.

Only having 9 sign ups on the first night of Karazhan is an unusual situation. A few months ago we would have 12-14 people signed up and the headache would be fitting them all in across the week. However, the summer has hit and although we don't have many students in the guild, we do have a lot of parents.

Because children don't need to get up early to go to school, during the summer holidays their bed times tend to slip later and later; no parent would pass up the chance to have a bit of a lie in after all. This means that a previously-attainable raid start time of 8:30 suddenly is slap bang in the middle of putting the kids to bed. The result is parents can't sign up for raids any more and have to log in later and do dailies and other grindy stuff.

So it's school holidays which seem to be having an impact on our raiding schedule; people have a load of alts they want to take into Karazhan so we are not short of signups, just those critical last few. For me, it may be some time before I can get into Karazhan healing, so I've signed up for the end-of-kara tuesday run as DPS. I'll find out tuesday lunchtime whether I'm successful or not.