Why Should WE Have to Market Our Guilds In Order to Build Membership?

I think the worst thing about the game is that it suggests a random list of guilds to players looking to join one, and the vast majority of these guilds are 99% inactive, or at least have an inactive captain.

IMHO, a guild should only appear on the suggestions list if the captain has been active within the last 24 hours. And they should be ordered by last active time, which most of the time will mean that every guild on the suggestions list will have a captain online ready to great the new member when they join. I can tell you from my experiences building a guild that there are vast quantities of players out there who are frustrated with all the inactive guilds, but are unable to find anything else unless they join leaderboard guilds, which usually only want higher-level players.

 

To take @Raptelan comments a step further. I started a second island and went through the guild selection process to see what it was like. He's right that the recommended guilds are totally random and you're presented with a list of maybe 30ish. Even more frustrating is most of the guilds recommended to me weren't even English speaking. And you cannot search for a guild unless you already belong to one! So you are either forced to choose one of the randomly selected guilds or pick one listed in the Top 100.

No wonder people are so frustrated trying to start a new guild. It's shouldn't be this way. Someone told me in other games you can search for a particular guild using advanced parameters. So for example, I could select primary language English, accepts PH 5, minimum rank 100, etc.

Perhaps other users can share ideas on this thread to give Midoki ideas on guild building and selection selection process in game. I also think someone from Midoki should create a new account and attempt to build a guild from scratch, just to understand how frustrating it really is.

 

A way to set the primary language would be very helpful. We have a few great german and chinese players though who are fluent in English, so the default search shouldn't restrict to your game language setting. We do put it in the guild description but nobody reads that anyways, and or course you can't search by it.

 

Posting here helps, but the single best recruitment tool is your guild being on the leaderboard, preferably in one of the two most visible spots (98-100th place since it's the first one you see, or 1-10th place).

 

Agreed. Tortuga Nest and Atarigeneration are well established, forums born guilds, but we both just had to push to the leader boards to fill spots. Worked like a charm

 

There still needs to be an in-game recruiting function, especially with no global chat. Every other game I've played in this genre has some way of recruiting. Thousands of newbie guilds are not going to be forum based. My first guild filled up and is still full but only because the name was something people commonly search for. As it is now, guilds are at the mercy of the search function or hard working forum members. And let's be honest, the forum world is a tiny fraction of the actual game community.

 

I also agree that guild recommendation needs rework/filtering options. Guild language, rank, and most recent activity should be filterable.

But yes, if you want quality members beyond random pickups, you're going to have to promote at some level offsite, or push for a high leaderboard rank to get their attention.

 

Off topic: I love your banner, Christy!

 

Thanks @Floki is my official banner maker. He comes up with some really good ones