guild-recruitment
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The Daily Grind: Effective guild recruiting?
Among the many places I crawl for news and interesting tidbits are some of the different unofficial MMO forums. But no matter if it is World of Warcraft or City of Heroes, it seems like there is always someone recruiting for their guild/supergroup/etc. Now, I'd note that I come from a relatively small guild, where several of us have played together since EQ. To me, the concept of open recruiting is a very strange one, as our group just doesn't do that. (The trade-off is that we're not on the bleeding edge of progression either.) But as someone who faces being a free-lancer in many other games that my home guild is not in, I have had to deal with pushy guild invites and pleading invites -- and those certainly never interest me. So this morning, we thought we'd ask you -- what's your best way to find new guild members? Does your group put out a recruiting call in different forums? Do you generally have people banging down the door to get into your group instead? Do you think it's best to play with someone several times before you recruit them so you have an idea of their tactics and abilities? Or is it just x-class, x-number, bring them in and work out the details later?
Your WoWJutsu rank
The folks at WoWJutsu provide a great little competitive tool that ranks guilds according to the PvE raid content they've completed. The site is pretty popular, and a lot of guilds use it in their advertising over at the Guild Recruitment Forums. My guild has been known to pay pretty close attention to the number. I have to admit that about once a week I find myself checking our ranking against those of other guilds my friends are in. This got me thinking... what good does basing your progress against other guilds do? Sure, there are the ultra competitive guilds like Death and Taxes and Nihilum. However they approach the game in a way that leads them to needing to care about how close the guild behind them is doing. For most of us, competing against other guilds is only going to lead to unforeseen frustrations. Most guilds have a boss or two that they get hung up on. Back in the days when BWL was hard, my guild spent a long time defeating Razorgore, and after he was gone the rest of the instance fell within a month. This kind of common hurdle in WoW is not reflected in WoWJutsu; all you get to know is that a guild is stuck on a boss, not that they're going to have amazing progress after it.
Running PUGs for the guild
The PUG has been a subject of several discussions lately, on WoW Insider and elsewhere. Today WoWGrrl wrote about how PUGs might be used to help out your guild. I can hear you, gentle reader, exclaim from the other side of the blog, but I am in a guild so that I don't have to run PUGs, so that I will always have people to group with. Yes, I know, but hear me out. WoWGrrl explains that PUGs are an excellent way to add new guild members to your roster, since for the most part they consist of people who have never grouped before running an instance together. I know from personal experience that much of my guild recruitment in the early days was based in PUGs: a few of us would run an instance, find a player with a great sense of humor who knew their class well, and we would invite them to join us. If we were charming enough as a group, proved we could work together, then every great once in a while that person deigned to join our guild.Once you're in the guild, however, the tendency is to try to get guild-only runs. After all, you joined the guild for support, right? Only a guild is made up of people of varying levels and interests, and while sometimes guild runs will fall magically into place, more times than not you're left feeling like guild chat is your own worst version of the LFG. This is where the PUG comes in. Where the guild might only be on at certain times, looking to work on specific tasks, a PUG is more consistently available. I say this because mathematically, there are more people who are out of your guild than people in your guild. Reading WoWGrrl's discussion has reminded me that PUGs can be useful tools even when you are in a guild. Heck, they even strengthen the guild itself when done consistently. I think I'll log in and start a recruiting PUG of my own.
