How to track raid attendance in WoW without starting a fight

Attendance numbers cause arguments when people suspect the math is unfair. A raider who was benched for strategy and then "dinged" for it will stop trusting the spreadsheet. A raider who told you three weeks ahead about a trip and still shows 70% will stop telling you. The fix is mostly decisions you make once, in writing, before the first number goes in.

Signup is not attendance

Signups record what a raider said they would do. Attendance records what happened. Keep them in separate columns, even if the same person fills in both. A signup list tells you who to expect. It can't tell you who left early, who was moved to the bench at pull time, or who clicked Attending and never logged in.

If your tool lets people mark their own attendance, treat the result as a signup. Only an officer who was there should write the attendance record.

The statuses worth having

Present and absent is too coarse. These six cover nearly every night:

• Attended: in the raid for the night.
• Late: arrived after the start but raided.
• Benched: told to sit out by the officers, usually for composition.
• Excused: absent with notice, in line with your policy.
• No call, no show: absent without a word, after saying they would come or without answering at all.
• Did not attend: missed the raid with no excuse on file.

The split between the last two matters. Someone who answers Absent on Monday for a Tuesday raid and someone who signs up, then never logs in, are different problems, and a flat "missed" count puts them together.

Write down what counts as notice. "At least 24 hours" is common. Whatever you pick, post it where raiders will see it, because the policy only works if it was visible before it was applied.

A fair percentage

Here are the rules we use in RaidOps, and they work in a spreadsheet too.

1. Count attended, late and benched as present. A benched player did what the group asked.
2. Leave excused nights out of both sides of the fraction. They shouldn't help or hurt.
3. Count no call no shows and did-not-attend nights as misses.
4. Skip nights that haven't been marked yet.

In a sheet, with one row per raider and one column per raid date, that looks like this for a row of statuses in B2:Z2:

=(COUNTIF(B2:Z2,"Attended")+COUNTIF(B2:Z2,"Late")+COUNTIF(B2:Z2,"Benched")) / (COUNTIF(B2:Z2,"Attended")+COUNTIF(B2:Z2,"Late")+COUNTIF(B2:Z2,"Benched")+COUNTIF(B2:Z2,"No Call No Show")+COUNTIF(B2:Z2,"Did Not Attend"))

It is ugly, and it breaks when someone types "attended" with a different spelling. Use a dropdown list for the cells. If you have more than a handful of raiders, this is where a purpose-built tool starts to earn its keep.

Alts and mains

Many raiders swap characters mid-tier. A player who raids on an alt for three weeks while their main sits out shouldn't show three absences. Group attendance by player: if any of a player's characters was in the raid, the whole player was there. Spreadsheets handle this badly because the name in the row is the character. This is one of the main reasons guilds outgrow them.

Look at a window, not a lifetime

An all-time percentage rewards people who raided a lot two expansions ago. For decisions, use a recent window, such as the last 30 and 90 days, and compare the two. A raider with 95% over 90 days and 60% over 30 days is telling you something has changed.

A streak (consecutive nights attended) is a simple companion number. It helps you notice who is quietly drifting away.

A reliability score

Percentages treat every miss the same. A reliability score weighs them differently: showing up earns the most, benching and being late earn less, and a no call no show costs the most. RaidOps scales its score from 0 to 100 and weights misses by whether the raider had signed up. You don't need a score. If you do build one, publish the weights.

Cross-checking with Warcraft Logs

A Warcraft Logs report lists everyone who was in the group for each pull, which makes it a decent cross-check against your marks. It has limits:

• It doesn't show who was benched on purpose, only who wasn't there.
• Nights when nobody logged have no report.
• A character name on a report may be an alt.

RaidOps can import a public report to confirm presence and record boss kills. It will not mark anyone absent from a log, because absence can't be proven from one.

Using the numbers

Data is only useful if it feeds a decision. Reasonable uses:

• Trials: set the expected attendance for the trial period before it starts.
• Bench rotation: when two raiders compete for one spot, recent attendance is a tiebreaker people accept.
• Check-ins: a 1-on-1 message at 80% beats a public callout at 60%.
• Recruiting: if the same role is always the problem, fix the roster instead of the raiders.

Keep the data visible to the people it describes. Raiders who can see their own record tend to argue about it less, and officers who can see the whole grid catch problems sooner.

How RaidOps handles it

Officers open the team's attendance grid, pick the raid date and mark each character with one of the six statuses above. The grid shows the newest nights on the left. From the marks, the app works out each raider's attendance percentage, 30 and 90-day views, a streak and a reliability score, with alts grouped under their mains. Raiders on the team can see the marks for their team. It's free, and the demo has several weeks of sample data to click through.

For the rest of the routine around attendance, see our raid management guide.

Frequently asked questions

How do you track raid attendance in WoW?

Mark each raider after every raid with a status such as attended, late, benched, excused or no call no show, then calculate a percentage over a recent window. You can do this in a spreadsheet, a Discord bot with attendance stats, or a roster app like RaidOps.

What is a good raid attendance percentage?

It depends on your team's goals. Every team sets its own bar, and progression-focused teams usually expect more than casual ones. Set the expectation per team and tell raiders before they join.

Should benched players count as present?

Yes, in most setups. They followed the officers' instruction. Counting a bench as an absence punishes the people who agreed to make the group better.

Should excused absences count against attendance?

No. Leave excused nights out of both the numerator and denominator so that giving notice doesn't hurt a raider's number.

Can Warcraft Logs track attendance?

It shows who was in each logged raid, which helps verify attendance. It can't show who sat out deliberately, and nights without a log have no data, so use it to confirm marks rather than replace them.