Recruitment Drive

Goldfolk

Goldfolk

Dalayan Elder
I do wonder if the recruitment drive is attempting to answer the wrong question.

As far as I understand it there are plenty of new people joining the server but this is matched by loads dropping form the game.

I was speaking to a friend who had apparently changed Guilds and he said quote," Veterans has 150 members of which 139 havent logged for a year"

While this is almost certainly an exaggeration the drop out rate seems very high at all levels.

I don't think there is anything that you can do about people who don't make it to 65 but I do wonder about people who reach say 65:50+ and give up because of difficulty of progression.

The issue is that lower tier Guilds seem to be a bit of a mess with people forming and reforming without ever getting much beyond tier 2/3. People seem to fall out at the slightest provocation and wreck the chances of establishing a sound guild.

I also know form bitter experience that it is near impossible to get 12-15 people to reliably log in European time even when you can guarantee some loot including relics. I'm not talking 7 times a week just once or twice. The net result is people with 65:200+ AAs and crap gear because they have few opportunities to raid.

I wondered if as an incentive it would be possible to have a faction bound Guild augment that gave players a modest boost. This could improve according to tier of guild say up to tier 4 or 5. In order for augment not to poof the Guild would have to kill at least one tier of the augment value per week and the players would have to have killed one mob per week in order to maintain their personal aug.

This would have several effects, it would encourage everyone to join a raid guild and raid regularly. It would discourage people from leaving guilds and from breaking up Guilds over petty fights. Hopefully, the net result would be fewer people leaving because of the lack of progression and for far fewer tantrums.

Just a thought

Eleazer
 
This idea is interesting, but I really don't think it would do anything to solve the problem you want to solve with it, or even addresses the reason for those problems existing. I don't think that making raid content below tier 4 easier by way of a free augment is going to increase people's desire to remain here and play longer.

If players truly want to they can pretty much skip up to tier 4 with tradeskilled and droppable gear. VD Tmaps drop relics and are completable with less than 18 people and don't require you to compete with other guilds for spawns. The release of tomes of power means that casters can nuke with their relics for damage comparable to a base archaic, the same kind of power increase goes for healers too. The wealth of deity augs and the rewards from newer quest chains are excellent as well. Breaking into the raid game is easier than it has ever been.

It can be a hassle to get a raidforce to log in on a low population server, but that's really the nature of raiding. It requires cooperation and organization from a group of people, adding an augment to your gear won't rearrange people's IRL obligations and priorities.

There is also the issue that the raid "tiers" are not a hard and fast division of difficulty, they are suggestions. There is no set distance of HP/DPS from mobs of a different tier, nor does SoD use "item points" to determine the stats of dropped gear from a certain tier like MMOs such as WoW do. To complicate things even further, many zones have encounters that span multiple tiers. I believe Plane of Fire starts at tier 5/6 and ramps up to 8 by the boss.

Also so far as this affects a "Recruitment Drive" most newbies that are recruited wouldn't see any benefit from this additional for at LEAST several weeks after joining the server. I played SoD for more than a year before I leveled to 65 and joined a raiding guild.

I'm also confused about one of your points,
It would discourage people from leaving guilds and from breaking up Guilds over petty fights. Hopefully, the net result would be fewer people leaving because of the lack of progression and for far fewer tantrums.
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How would this augment accomplish this? If a player has a hissy fit and wants to leave a guild, they will, and all it will cost them is this augment that they get for free for joining any guild that raids. I also don't see how it could possibly lead to "fewer tantrums" because it does nothing to address the causes of these tantrums. (Not really relevant but in my experience 99% of tantrums are related to loot)


I do like the idea of providing some sort of reward for guilds that raid regularly, it is an interesting one. I could see something more like an activated trophy in the house of whoever is tagged as guildleader. One trophy activated at a time, limited to possesion of a single trophy of any type (to prevent stocking up) and it degrades after 3-7 days, effects variable depending on the difficulty of the monster killed, and perhaps even the characteristics of the mob itself.
 
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i think they should implement recruit a friend like wow has except they should give u two free months instead of one like wow cause thats lame and theirs no mounts here to give u
 
Really don't mind how it is done but something that encourages you to be in a stable Guild, raid regularly and discourages you from leaving because you have some petty fit would maybe help Guilds to make the jump from Tier 3/4 to 5/6/.
 
Keeping people in your guild depends solely on the leadership abilities of your officers and leader, and the type of people you recruit in the first place.

Every guild is going to grab a person or two at some point that constantly bitches about loot not going to them. At some point, you'll replace this person and move on. If it so happens you recruited 10 of these people when you started your guild, I would suggest grabbing the non-bitchy ones and starting over. Its just the nature of MMO's.
 
Guild issues... only thing i can say, regardless of benefits, they always exist (Like robopirateninja stated). Any Pay to play has their own benefits and the drama/problems STILL exist. Asking the game to provide more benefits to guilds won't really solve the issue but inviting your friends to raid EQ with you might.
kibeth sums it up nicely as well. Its hard to find the good people but you'll be glad when you do.

As for the recruit a friend system, it may not work quite as well since ...well the system WoW uses depends on people paying for one account. Also it would easily be abused as people could create fake accounts (free to play?), "reccomend" themselves, and just power level some new characters.
It'd be no different than just giving increased rates to everyone under level 65 in the long run (Which is what the account drive is doing for a set amount of time).

To sum it up, group with people to try and find people you can trust to raid with and/or invite people to join SoD to raid along side with you. In other words, theres not much you can do if you either have bad luck or lack of will on a low population server like this one.

I know it contradicts what I said but in spirit of trying to provide a benefit to raiding, could possibly add an experience flag to certain raid mobs. Say if you kill certain minis or raid bosses, you get a flat 10-5% bonus to exp gained for several days. Slap some diminishing returns on the exp gained bonus to avoid higher tier'ed guilds constantly farming lower bosses for said bonus or add a higher bonus to higher tiers that don't stack with other raid boss kill bonus exp.
 
I enjoyed this discussion, only wish it was as easy as just getting a few friends to join.

Fact is that maybe 1 or 2 guilds have managed to stabilise and progress in past year.

The situation has been made worse by the attrition rate in the high end guilds that have poached promising and enthusiastic players and therefore destabilised the lower tier guilds.

What I do find bizarre is the number of people who play 6+ hours a day seven days a week for 6 months or longer and then one day suddenly quit and are never seen again.

I must know 20 or so players some of whom were just about to break out of the can't raid/can't improve cycle who have done this.
 
People get burned out, they disappear, they appear again months later acting like nothing happened. That is the usual cycle.

Then you have the "I only appear during summer" people who appear for summer and disappear rest of year.

Then you have the babies who stop because their guilds won't group with them or they can't find a group (usually because they suck and word spread) and quit to move on to ruin another game.

No matter the cycle there is few things that hold true. If a guild starts, it has a small chance of living past a few months. If a guild get a drama person, it can kill the guild by draining. If we get more people, we have a new crop of idiots to prove again what was already stated.
 
What I do find bizarre is the number of people who play 6+ hours a day seven days a week for 6 months or longer and then one day suddenly quit and are never seen again.
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Unemployment dries up?
 
Or as one person muttered would start playing again if her therapist said it was OK.

I can understand people getting a job and reducing playing time to 2 or 3 times a week. Seems a bit sad to stop completely.

Plenty of people on server have jobs, I personally know at least 3 others lol.
 
Goldfolk said:
I can understand people getting a job and reducing playing time to 2 or 3 times a week. Seems a bit sad to stop completely.
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Why is it sad to stop completely? People burn out all the time when it starts to feel less like a game and more like a job.

It'd be sad if you continued playing even when you're not having any fun at all.
 
Usually happens when you get stuck with a bad group of people in a guild or end up playing to obligate others online to the point where it doesn't feel like a game anymore. Not to kick a dead horse but usually its not a job that keeps people from doing what they want; they either make time for what they want to do, or just don't do it at all.

In my case, I went on hiatus for a year (maybe 2?) because I got bored of not grouping/enjoying raids and ended up coming back again but at a much slower playing pace.
I'd have to admit, the server community is much stronger here and theres definitely a lot less kids than on WoW (Some people will argue this but I seriously doubt that). Bad players get flagged pretty quickly and word spreads. Theres always the player that get carried but they don't usually last long.
Anyways, I forgot where I was going with this but SoD/EQ in general seems to normally be good about sifting out bad players (Go GM's!) in the later game in terms of ratio to other MMO's.

Besides, breaks can be good once in awhile for any game. You need that contrast to remind you why the game was fun sometimes.
 
Goldfolk said:
I can understand people getting a job and reducing playing time to 2 or 3 times a week. Seems a bit sad to stop completely.

Plenty of people on server have jobs, I personally know at least 3 others lol.
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It depends on the requirements of the job. If you get a new job and start having to get up at 4:30 to be there on time, and requires lots of hours, there may be little point to continuing to try to play. This is exactly why I left live years ago. A couple years and a new job later, I found SoD. ;)

If you've an active raiding, but your new schedule prevents you from raiding, there may be little point to continuing. Also, if you feel SoD consumes too much of your life to be healthy, and don't have the willpower to moderate it, it's easier just to quit altogether than to try to limit your time, and just get sucked back in.
 
It does suck when you feel it is a job. You get on even when you don't want to so you can keep the guild motivated and active. Has happened to me for quite a few guilds and here is what I learned. When you feel it is a job to get on and play officer in guild, the guild is probably going to die. You are having to work harder to keep something alive that is slipping through the fingers.
 
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