Hey Lost
Supportive posts are always welcome in my opinion
I certainly agree with you that setting rules protect the good mood of the group instead of spoiling it.
I've heard rumours that people don't like it anymore because they can't talk in /raid, but I guess that says more about the person then about the rules. And the only thing we ask of you is that you chat in /tribeschatter. We have fun raids in ZG, we can get to Hakkar and kill him, while we are making jokes in that channel.
Oh, and I think the "absolute silence" would be a good idea during tactics and during looting!
Ofc I see this from a Master Looters point of view, and althought I have a lot of different chatwindows so I can concentrate on one that is the most important (whisper vs raid, raid vs guild, LFG/General/trade vs the rest) it is somewhat distracting sometimes to have for example lots of "gratses" coming by, or whatever else

Sometimes people ask something in /say or something instead of in guild/tribeschatter which then I missed so I try to read that but with too many talking in there that gets too hard, so I miss stuff if people don't /w me.
And maybe some others don't have so many chat windows, maybe sometimes my "who wants this and this" might get "scrolled out" very fast, cause sometimes someone is very very late with saying they want something

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Maybe some more clear rules about trials would be good as well. Now we try to be patient with people at their first raid ofc, cause a 40 man raid can be quite overwhelming. But intuitively you can see a clear difference with people that make mistakes because they are new to it all and they try to improve, and people that just don't care about anything. With the first, you are more patient that with the latter. The first you invite back even tho they did stupid stuff like pulling/dpsing/whatever, because you see potential and a good will, with the latter, you think "nevermind...I'll won't take you back anymore.."
(I have to say, we don't get that many people that want to progress from greens to purple right away. The majority of the people that joined recently has quite good blue gear already.)
But intuition is not as clear for everyone as just a set of rules "this is what you can expect"
Ofcourse, we don't have the luxury of many numbers. So if a new member joins and he's nice, better have him sooner than later. But we shouldn't let the fact that we only have a "named" group of around 30 stop us from not inviting/removing bad elements. Better be with 30 and have a good raid/nice time/do something, cause we've shown what we can do with 30, then having one person that spoils the raid for the rest.