Guild Wars 2

The title says it all. I’m the co-leader of a small guild that struggles to recruit. I just don’t understand why it’s so difficult. So I’m asking the forums for some tips and ideas to help our small guild (less than 10) grow and flourish.

First off, our handicap is that we put our real lives first before the game, so being on every single day just isn’t feesible for most of us in the guild. We try and do activities together, but for the most part, anybody who does join, just ends up leaving anywhere within a few hours to a few days. If that is the reason why, then I guess my guild is forever doomed to be small, but I wanted to at least try and reach out and get some help.

So any tips/pointers would be great, thanks!

Can post thread here.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/lookingfor

If do probably should say like you do here about people not on all the time because life.

I have posted in there before. Not a single response or mail in-game. Here was my original recruitment thread.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/lookingfor/Legend-Voyager-Crew-LVC-is-Recruiting/first#post5848588

Another good way is find people in game need help. Like new player or place where player look like need help and help them. After you can tell about guild to them and offer invitation. If player see you help other maybe more interest in you guild.

The worst way to recruit is advertising the existence of your guild. Every guild does that and people ignore it until they feel pressure to find a guild quickly for some reason. This is the equivalent of sending out flyers in the mail (or spam): 1,000s of announcements for a tiny number of recruits. It’s OK for spam, since the cost per mail is tiny; it’s horrid for the guild recruiter, who has to physically run around pasting the message in every map.

The best way to recruit is to do stuff and invite people to join.

Voyager Crew [LVC] is running a hero point train at 03:00 server (UTC) time. PM me to join us.

Enterprise Crew [Kirk] is helping people learn to navigate the new HoT zones. We help you to help yourself by showing you durable builds, routes for getting around, and how to contribute to the meta, in ways that help you max your own rewards. PM me to learn the ropes (or to offer your services).

Alternatively, enter a zone together and wait until someone asks for help, then swoop in and pick up folks, assisting them with story or HP or whatever.

Or if you must resort to spamming instances and the /lookingfor forum, use your soapbox to set your guild apart from the 10,000 other 5-person guilds looking to expand to 20.

• Less is more; shorter messages are more effective.
• Every guild is full of friendly people who enjoy the game, so only mention the things that are special to you.
• Target the message at the kind of person you want in your guild. Are you guys serious? silly? religious? irreverent? then make sure your message illustrates that.
• Pick a focus and use that to recruit. Lots of guilds advertise that they do everything, but very few guilds actually do everything all the time. What do you guys spend the most time doing? What are you best at? What do you fail at?

As the leader of a fairly small-ish guild, I’ll say this: Leading an online community is a full time job. There’s no way around this fact. You put the community first in your life or it cannot flourish.

Yes, RL is more important than a video game. The issue is though, that people join guilds to be with friends, to have people to talk to, and to have people to play with. As the leader of a micro guild such as yours, as a co-leader, you need to be online ALL THE TIME during your guild’s prime time, or else people will get bored and simply leave.

From personal experience, when I took vacations and such, it would take months of rebuilding the guild afterwards due to a huge inactivity hole that my vacation would create (i.e. from a 45man guild down to a 25 man guild from a 1 month vacation).

Also, if your guild is a PvE guild, the question then becomes “why yours?”. There’s thousands of PvE guilds out there, many of which are more organised, larger, and have more presence and more fun to be in. You have to ask yourself what makes your guild special and what makes it stand out. If there’s nothing that makes it stand out, why even have the guild at all? It’s a waste of resources and time, and does nothing but stroke your own ego.

It’s very hard to recruit people to a small guild because there are a lot of small guilds all playing catch up. Everyone comes into the game and their first thought is, I can run a guild. It would be cool.

Running a guild is work and dedication and not for the faint of heart. I do it and I wouldn’t wish it on most people. I break my back keeping that guild going some months. But I do it because the reward is great.

That said, my guild has 250 members. How do I recruit? At this point, mostly word of mouth, but occasionally I’ll say something in map chat.

Running this guild is a full time job. But it’s part of my game. There are times when it feels pretty thankless. But then it gets better again.

The other problem is joining a bigger guild gets you guild mission success more often, more buffs more guild advantages.

The stuff you usually get from a small guild, you can get from adding people to your friend’s list. All it really gives you is a chat channel.

I don’t agree that small guilds just bring a chat channel. It heavily depends on how you run the small guild or the numbers you have in mind when you mention small. I consider our guild quite small (25-ish), yet we have a lvl 27 guild hall and do raids. And people love the fact that everyone knows eachother. In a large guild all of us would feel lost and that is the reason why we pick this kind of guild.

I think that everyone agrees though that running a guild takes time. And it does not scale with the size of your guild. A small guild also takes a lot of time to run as you have to do more yourself and less officers. Recruiting simply takes time.

What I’ve found is that smaller guilds cannot compete with larger ones. When it comes to doing big stuff with huge rewards (anything from dungeons, fractals to raids and all the latest HoT goodness), then smaller guilds don’t really have a leg to stand on.

You could advertise 100% rep but this will turn people away who want to rep other guilds, be they smaller or larger, and for whatever duration. If you have an up-and-coming guild with a guild hall and you’re looking to get certain upgrades done, you need help with just about everything there is to maintaining it. Materials, guild events like missions, treks, etc. all requires help, and if you don’t have the numbers from recruiting then it feels like a wasted effort.

It seems to me like there’s too much competition with people always vying for a guildie’s presence to help them rep the guild. Without representation, your guild will slump. I work a 60-65 hour a week job and have very little time for this game compared to what I used to. I have another guildie who is my right hand assisting me with recruiting and stuff, but it’s an uphill struggle for smaller guilds to get to where the bigger guilds are.

Smaller guilds flounder where the larger ones flourish, it seems… that’s basically all there is to it.

You know, the best way to recruit (apart from ingame recruiting) is this forum. But you’ve gotta take care of your thread and advertise your guild in an attractive way.
I’ve noticed that the thread you linked wasn’t updated for a while (it has to be bumped every day & remember to delete the old bumps so that it doesn’t look like spam-fest). Besides, your recruitment message looks like you’re constantly trying to “apologize” for the fact that the guild is small. Scratch that!
Advertise your guild as a “family guild” (that’s what a lot of small guilds do and it works perfectly), write about the stuff that makes you proud of your guild. What you guys are like, what are your interests, what you can offer, what are your achievements that you are proud of etc.
Definitely don’t write stuff like: “Granted, we can’t be on all the time (we do place our work and our lives before a game), and due to our small numbers, recruiting has been a nightmare (nobody wants to give us time to recruit because we’re “not on 24/7”)”.
People don’t want to know this. What they want to know is that you’re adult-friendly (because you don’t require people do be online 24/7), your main focus is having fun and supporting eachother.
Mention what time most of you are usually online, when you do Guild Missions.
Tell people about your rank system (how they can potentially progress in ranks, if they can or cannot decorate the Hall etc).
That’s it!
If the way you present your guild looks like you’re not exactly hyped about how awesome your guild is (cause you mention the downsides more than the positives), people are gonna notice it and won’t be interested.
Also, make it as short and sweet as possible so that people actually read your thread and get the vital info straight away.

Hope this helps.

Hey Bristingr! I’ve ran and do run several online communities, including a new guild I started in GW2 three months ago. We are currently at roughly 80 members, 50 of whom are active. Otherwise, I run a 160 member Steam group, and before that a 150+ member TESO guild.

What I can say, is this:

• It is very helpful to be able to play regularly with your guild. As a GM, people rely on you being around more than you think, and thus the group is very fragile. There is a way around this, however.

• I like to think of groups as like jigsaw puzzles. Members need other members that they can fit in and get along with, and if a member leaves or isn’t around, that can mean other members that relied on them being around will also leave, and you’ll get cascades and go dead.

• There are ways to fix this: if you have friends that are a lot more active than you are, bring them to the guild and ask them to help. Make them involved in the guild, give them an officer position or something. The way to keep everyone loyal and in your guild is to get them invested in it in some way, and at the start you’ll need to trust some friends or friends that you make to help you grow it, and they will thus become invested in it as well since they helped build it with you.

• If you’ve run out of friends, you need to make some more! If you’re doing an event or something, and there are other players around you, just invite them to a party and start doing stuff with them. Don’t be shy! Once they’ve played with you for a bit and you’ve socialized, be honest and ask them to join your guild. Talk to them as a person, not try to give them a generic ad. Many people are looking specifically for a small guild.

• This comes to the next point; generalized spam ads really are only for large or established guilds, they just bring a few extra members here and there through brute force. Aside from meeting people from the game and bringing friends, there is a form of generalized and targetted advertising that is helpful, for any size guild, including small ones: generalized and targetted (to a specific person) reddit and forum ads.

Now personally, I’ve had a lot more luck with the subreddit than the forums, however the forums gives you their in-game name. Use the subreddit (/r/guildrecruitment) to respond to people looking specifically for what your guild has to offer. You’d be surprised at how many people want small guilds over large ones, and indeed many of my members are those people. Don’t just make copypasta replies to each person there though. You can have a general layout or module for your post, but make sure that you write the majority of it to that person. If they are looking for a bunch of things, tell them that you have most or all of those things. Be honest.

You can also setup an enjin site with a easy application (for instance, I have it so that people just enter their Name.1234 and their home world). Make a weekly post to the subreddit/forums advertising your guild and put that application, as well as the names of your most active recruiters/officers in the post. People are lazy; the less hoops you make them have to jump through, the more likely they’ll bother to come to you. Make your guild desirable, but make it really, really easy to get into; otherwise other guilds will out-easy you, and you’ll be done over-hard (sigh… it’s too early for me to be making stupid jokes). Make sure your enjin application is really super simple. Ask people to mail or whisper you or your officers in-game. Simple things.

Involvement

The problem you’ll reach after that, of course, is keeping those futhermuckers in your guild, especially if you are not regularly active as a GM. In that case, those members will rely on the other members to give them their reasons to be there. That’s actually the entire goal anyways, even if you are an active GM. You as the GM are just a large boost for that, but you can have other people that are the involved ones who hold the group together for you.

Look at squeezing participation and socialization out of your members in the time you are online. Make them do things together. People are lazy, if you’re running a casual/semi-casual guild, you’ll need to strongly suggest it to them. If you ask too nicely, most people will always say no. Get some of your members who you know will do things with you to come along first, and then ask others to come “join me and [friend] and [friend] for [activity]”. Call them by name to come along with you. It’s alright if they refuse (unless you’re running a super hardcore guild), but make sure you suggest to them strongly that they really should come along and do stuff with their guild.

Voice comms are also another good way to get members more involved with each other. The requisite is, of course, having a few members that will actually use it.

I recommend Discord for voice comms, for a lot of reasons: It’s both voice and text, it’s a lot newer, sleeker, faster and just generally nicer than the oldschool TeamSpeaks or Mumbles, it’s entirely free (they host the servers for you and everything), and most importantly, it doesn’t require a download nor account because there’s a web version. Remember, your members are going to be really lazy. Make a custom bit.ly link for the web version (say, your guild tag and a number or short phrase) of your Discord channel and whisper members with it, suggesting that they join. It’s a lot easier to get them into something if they don’t have to download a thing, enter strings of numbers or some other stuff, when instead they could just type a short custom bit.ly and DING! They’re in your channel.

Your goal as a GM really is to set the basis of having your members do stuff together. When you have that, and your members are invested specifically in your guild, then you’re a lot more stable. Focus on growing, focus on getting people that can help grow the guild for you, and focus on making your guild a community that actually does things together. Sure there’s millions of PvE, PvX, PvP North-Ameripean casualcore social-engineered whatever-the-kitten guilds out there. But it doesn’t matter, because only one of those guilds will be yours, and yours will be the specific one that certain people want to be in, because that’s where their buddies are. Be their buddy and make them buddies.

Drops mic, trips and falls off stage

Goodluck.

Also, Bristingr, feel free to come whisper me in-game if you need any more help. Name is obviously on the left.

Thank you all for the helpful information! And to those that PM’ed me, I’ll get to you shortly. Also, I was unaware we could delete our own posts in this forum. I’ll definitely keep that in mind.

“All of us do enjoy all game modes (PvE, PvP, WvW, Dungeons, Fractals, World Bosses, Guild Missions, Story Missions, even Roleplaying” that literally means nothing since players would have easier time finding their own niche in a big guild with bigger population. You guys don’t play everyday due to real life so you need something specific like full clear raid/speedrun fractal/high end pvp team/well known wvw havoc group etc to attract players.

Currently it seems like you aren’t looking for guildies, you are looking for friends. You have to find a center of focus to attract soon-to-be core members to build up on. You can start by inviting your friends that aren’t in the guild yet or have a guild meeting to find a strong focal point.