Sunday, January 18, 2015

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor - Reviving an Old Guild

If you've been stopping by the stream you've probably noticed that the new expantion to World of Warcraft has sucked me in.  I'm in love with the game right now and having a really great time.  That being said, our guild, has been all but dead for months.  I started hearing the few guys who would log in from time to time start talking about all of us joining a bigger better guild and it all felt hopeless.  

I decided I was going to do something about it and I have been trying every which way to find the right people for our guild ever since.  I would say my drive to start boosting our numbers started at about Christmas time and since then we've picked up about 10 new players.  Of those 10, 2 are friends from Twitch who used their free 90 boost to get characters on our server (Boulderfist).  4 of them are married couples who came to the game in pairs.  One couple was the tank/healer of a dungeon I was in.  The other I met via a recruitment post on /r/wowguilds.  The other 4 are people we met in the world who were guildless who I convinced to give us a shot.  There have been a few members added through trade and one rogue who was griefing alliance in Spires of Arak who needed to join us, but there has been no one good way to get new players.

I'm posting this because I'm actually very curious to see how this works out and want to start documenting a kind of... recruitment journal... so I can start to go back and review my notes as the guild grows... or doesn't.

The hardest part of recruiting right now is that we don't have any finite goals.  Most people recruiting are looking for something functional.  They want melee DPS who can raid Monday and Wednesday from 18:00 to 23:00 server time in ilvl 650+.  That's easy.  People who see that and fit the bill who are not happy with their guild situation will notice.  The only difficulty is getting your message in front of those people.  When your only goal is to find fun people to play with and eventually do rated battlegrounds and some minor raiding... what the hell do you say to get the right people to notice?  I mean, you can go and say just that, but there's a big difference between a guild that has 500 members who don't know each other and just casually do stuff together when they can and a group of 20 players who all know each other well and have fun spending time together even though both of those groups are pulling from the same pool of players.

I'm stumped, but not frustrated.  If I can pick up one good player who wants to be a part of the guild every week then that's great.  I just need to keep working at it and keep trying.  I just don't know where is the best place to look.

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