Everybody raids Thursday and nobody raids Saturday
I read the schedule out of 3,592 logged raid nights. Thursday is the busiest evening in the game, Saturday the emptiest, and Tuesday barely exists in Europe — for a reason written into the game itself.
In brief. I pulled the raid schedule out of every guild the directory watches — 3,592 raid nights across 1,657 guilds — by looking at when their bosses actually died rather than at what their recruitment post claims. Thursday is the most common raid night in the game, with half of all guilds on it. Saturday is the emptiest, at 17%. Tuesday is a US institution and a European irrelevance, which turns out to be a lockout mechanic rather than a cultural one. And two nights a week is the single most common schedule, at 36%.
Every guild believes its raid days are normal and everybody else's are strange. I have led raids on Tuesday and Thursday for years and quietly assumed that was simply what raid nights were, in the way you assume everyone's family has the same Christmas traditions until you spend one at somebody else's house.
So I went and counted. Here is the actual shape of the raiding week.
What did I actually measure?
When bosses died, for every guild the directory has seen in the last eight weeks — 3,592 distinct raid nights across 1,657 active guilds on Spineshatter, Thunderstrike, Nightslayer and Dreamscythe — plus three lonely guilds on Годовщина, who I have not forgotten but cannot draw a conclusion from.
Nobody's raid days are typed into this site. A night counts as a scheduled night when a guild started a raid on that weekday in two or more separate weeks — one heroic Saturday because Sunday fell through is not a Saturday schedule, and two weeks is the cheapest test that tells the difference.
Two things about method, up front, because both limit what I can claim:
- A realm's clock is not in the data. Warcraft Logs stores UTC, so a US raid that starts at 21:00 Eastern is already Wednesday by the time it is written down. I shift US realms by Eastern and EU realms by Central European before deciding what day it was. Out of curiosity I re-ran the whole thing with US realms on Pacific instead, four hours out, and only 23 of 1,657 guilds changed a single day. Raid nights start in the evening, which is nowhere near midnight, so the answer is not sensitive to which US timezone I pick.
- Most of the tables below use a subset of 1,210 guilds that I have watched log for five weeks or more. That is the honest sample, and the last section explains why.
Which night do most guilds raid?
Thursday, by a nose from Sunday. Half the directory is raiding on each of them.
| Night | Guilds | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday | 611 | 50% |
| Sunday | 602 | 50% |
| Wednesday | 573 | 47% |
| Monday | 335 | 28% |
| Tuesday | 316 | 26% |
| Friday | 284 | 23% |
| Saturday | 202 | 17% |
The gap between the top three and the bottom four is enormous. Thursday, Sunday and Wednesday carry roughly half the guilds each; Saturday carries one in six. If you have ever tried to organise a Saturday raid and found the server strangely empty, that is not paranoia — three-quarters of the raiding population has plans.
The Friday and Saturday numbers are the ones I did not expect. The received wisdom is that weekends are when people are free, so weekends are when guilds raid. In practice only 32% of guilds touch a weekend day at all, and just 64 guilds in the entire directory raid exclusively on Friday or Saturday. Being free is not the constraint. Being free at the same time as twenty-four other people is, and midweek evenings turn out to be the easier thing to synchronise.
Why does Tuesday barely exist in Europe?
Because the weekly lockout resets on Tuesday in America and Wednesday in Europe, and everyone raids the day it resets.
This is the single biggest split in the data, and it is not a difference in taste at all:
| Night | US guilds | EU guilds |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | 30% | 56% |
| Monday | 19% | 30% |
| Tuesday | 54% | 18% |
| Wednesday | 37% | 50% |
| Thursday | 58% | 48% |
| Friday | 22% | 24% |
| Saturday | 17% | 17% |
Tuesday is the second-most popular night in the US and the least popular in the EU. Wednesday does the same thing in reverse. Those two rows are the same behaviour — "raid the night the instance resets" — wearing different hats, because Blizzard resets US realms on Tuesday morning and EU realms on Wednesday morning.
Everything else lines up behind it. American guilds raid on reset day and skip a night: Tuesday and Thursday. European guilds raid on reset day and come back at the end of the lockout: Wednesday and Sunday. Sunday is 56% in the EU and 30% in the US for the same reason — in Europe it is the last night before the lockout expires, and in America it is a night that is already two days too late.
Thursday tops the overall table because it is the only night that works well in both worlds: day three after a US reset, day two after a European one.
What is the most common two-night schedule?
Sunday and Wednesday, and it is not close — 22% of every two-night guild in the game runs exactly those two.
Among the 430 guilds that raid exactly two nights a week:
| Schedule | Guilds | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday + Wednesday | 93 | 22% |
| Sunday + Thursday | 75 | 17% |
| Monday + Thursday | 41 | 10% |
| Wednesday + Thursday | 40 | 9% |
| Tuesday + Thursday | 39 | 9% |
| Monday + Wednesday | 27 | 6% |
Split by region, the two classic schedules appear exactly where you would expect. Sunday + Wednesday is 10% of all EU guilds; among US guilds the top pairing is Tuesday + Thursday at 9%. Those are the two default settings of the game, and about a fifth of all raiding runs on one of them.
Notice what almost nobody does: back-to-back nights. Wednesday + Thursday manages 9%, but Saturday + Sunday is eight guilds out of 430. Guilds instinctively leave a gap, and I think they are right to — a night off between raids is when people farm consumables, and a guild that raids Saturday and Sunday is a guild that shows up on Sunday with no flasks.
If I already raid one night, what is the second one?
Thursday. Whatever your first night is, Thursday is the most likely partner — for five of the seven days.
Read this as: of the guilds that raid the night on the left, what percentage also raid the night along the top?
| If they raid… | Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunday | · | 30% | 27% | 54% | 58% | 32% | 19% |
| Monday | 53% | · | 33% | 54% | 63% | 34% | 20% |
| Tuesday | 51% | 36% | · | 45% | 69% | 31% | 26% |
| Wednesday | 60% | 34% | 26% | · | 51% | 32% | 22% |
| Thursday | 56% | 35% | 35% | 45% | · | 29% | 21% |
| Friday | 62% | 38% | 32% | 57% | 59% | · | 36% |
| Saturday | 55% | 34% | 40% | 58% | 64% | 53% | · |
Tuesday and Thursday is the strongest bond in the data: 69% of Tuesday guilds also raid Thursday. If you raid Tuesday, you almost certainly raid Thursday, and that pairing is so entrenched in the US that it functions as a single unit.
The Saturday row is the interesting one. Saturday guilds are not weekend guilds at all — 64% of them also raid Thursday and 58% also raid Wednesday. Saturday is almost never a schedule; it is a third night bolted onto a midweek one.
How many nights a week does a guild actually raid?
Two. More than a third of the directory, and the plurality answer by a distance.
| Nights per week | Guilds | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 333 | 28% |
| 2 | 430 | 36% |
| 3 | 210 | 17% |
| 4 | 128 | 11% |
| 5 | 72 | 6% |
| 6 or 7 | 37 | 3% |
There are 37 guilds raiding six or seven nights a week and I want to be respectful about this, but at that point it is not a raid schedule, it is a second job with worse dental.
The one-night row deserves a warning label, and it gets one two sections down: a meaningful chunk of it is guilds I cannot see properly rather than guilds that genuinely raid once.
Does raiding more nights get you further?
A bit. Much less than the recruitment posts imply.
Black Temple and Hyjal opened on 27 August, so this is one lockout's worth of a brand-new tier — the purest available test of how much raw scheduled time buys you. Bosses down out of fourteen, by nights per week, among guilds I have watched for seven weeks or more:
| Nights per week | Guilds | Median bosses | Mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 137 | 9 | 8.9 |
| 2 | 259 | 9 | 9.2 |
| 3 | 146 | 10 | 9.6 |
| 4 | 95 | 10 | 9.6 |
| 5 | 44 | 10 | 9.5 |
| of 14 |
Quadrupling your raid week is worth about 0.7 bosses in the opening week of a tier, and the curve is flat after three nights. Some of that flatness is my measurement — under-detected guilds land in the one-night row and drag its average up, which compresses the gap rather than inflating it, so the true difference is probably a little larger than 0.7. It is not four times larger.
The previous tier makes the point more bluntly. Among the same guilds, SSC and Tempest Keep is a 10 out of 10 clear at every single schedule length, from one night a week to five. Given enough weeks, hours stop mattering entirely; everybody gets there.
This is the same finding as hardcore guilds raiding for less time, not more, arriving from a different direction. Progression is not bought with evenings.
Which night should I put my new guild on?
This bit is opinion rather than measurement, so treat it as such.
- If you want the easiest recruiting, raid the crowd's nights. Thursday, Sunday and Wednesday are where the raiders already are, and a raider looking for a guild has a schedule they already keep. Half the directory being on Thursday means half the potential recruits are free on Thursday.
- If you want the least competition, Saturday is wide open — and it is open for a reason, so go in knowing you are choosing a smaller pool of people rather than an untapped one.
- Leave a gap between your nights. Tuesday/Thursday and Sunday/Wednesday both put two clear days between raids, and both became defaults without anyone organising it. That is a lot of independent guilds converging on the same answer.
- Do not raid on your reset morning and call it a night off. If you are in the EU, Wednesday is your reset and Sunday is your deadline. Everything else is negotiable.
The guild directory filters on raid nights in your own timezone, with an all of these / any of these / only these switch, so you can check what an actual schedule looks like before committing to one. If you already know which nights you are free, that filter plus the recruiting list is roughly a five-second version of this whole post.
What is this data bad at?
Seeing a guild's full schedule when it has not been logging for long — and it is worth knowing how badly, because it is the one number here I would not quote at a stranger.
The longer I have watched a guild, the more nights I find:
| Weeks I have seen them log | Guilds | Mean nights found | Share showing one night |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 145 | 1.18 | 85% |
| 3–4 | 302 | 1.56 | 60% |
| 5–6 | 434 | 2.19 | 38% |
| 7+ | 776 | 2.54 | 22% |
A guild seen for two weeks looks like a one-night guild 85% of the time. The same guild seen for eight weeks looks like a one-night guild 22% of the time. It did not change its schedule; I got better at seeing it. That is why every table above uses the five-weeks-and-up subset, and why I would still guess the true "one night a week" share is nearer 15% than 28%.
Three more honest limits:
- This only sees guilds that upload logs. A guild that raids Saturday and never logs is invisible to me, and I have no way of knowing whether non-logging guilds pick different nights. My instinct is that they skew casual and skew weekend, which would mean I am understating Saturday.
- A raid night is dated from the first boss that died, so a guild that spent an entire evening wiping without a kill contributes nothing. That is rarer than it sounds — a wipe night usually still produces one trash-tier kill — but it is real, and it will quietly bias against guilds on hard progression.
- Nights are shown by when raids start. A raid that begins Saturday at 23:30 and finishes at 02:00 is a Saturday raid here, which is the right answer, but it means the very late crowd is filed under the day they would say it was rather than the day the clock says.
None of that moves the headline. Thursday is the busiest night in the game, Saturday is the quietest, and if your guild is arguing about which two nights to raid, roughly a fifth of everyone else has already settled on Sunday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday depending on which continent the reset happens on.