Well, recruiting 20 is never going to happen on any server to be honest. Numbers never concern me much in the grand scheme of things, because at the end of the day for me, and IL it isn't about progressing at a quick pace to match Crimson Tempest, Triality, Shadows of Doom, etc, it's about logging in with a small group of friends and having fun, while challenging oursevles with new encounters.

Bots have been a consistent theme for the 3ish years i've been in IL (90% of the players who botted then still bot now), for whatever reason all the healing and the utility like to go to the other guilds first. Will that change if the guilds who are slumping continue to slump? It's probable, but we're not worried about it, because our botters are still having a blast. Burning players out doesn't concern me, due to the fact we have a very low attendance requirement, very short houred raids, and our members know if they dont feel like raiding we're not requiring them to be online that night. There happiness is more important than killing anything at all as far as i'm concerned. If we were to log in for 4 hours wipe to anything and still be laughing, and having a good time i'm content, and that form of leadership rubs off and makes the players feel at home and want to log in. They log in because our raids are fun, laid back usually (every so often it gets intense, and most raiding guilds need that once in a while).

What didn't work for evolutia has worked for IL since way before i was even a member. The reason we're still going forward is because of the botters, many nights we probably wouldn't have been able to raid anything worthwhile. Being able to log in bots for classes you need becomes and advantage vs. a disadvantage in that scenario and makes it even more fun to win.

Would a wait list every night be awesome? Sure it would. Is it necessary to progress? Havn't seen it to this day, and will continue to disagree with that entire notion of "you need 54 to beat X encounter". Because I'll gladly do it with less. What's with the question "why struggle every raid?", the only encounter i recall struggling on was Aprosis, and we were fielding full raids at the time. Took us a while to get it, but havn't struggled on anything since then. Sure sullon zek was rough but nothing like Aprosis was to us.

Don't get me wrong i'm not selling short how much easier things would be with 54 mains most nights or even every night but I will never buy into the you need a full raid to beat any encounter. Talent and skill will always be in my mind greater than Gear and numbers. Hell, 54 may do worst than botting for IL imo. We get bored rather easily on easy content, i couldn't imagine filling up every night and beating down encounter after encounter, that would likely "burn" people out. (or "bore" us out whichever you prefer)