Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

If you are new to the D-Mail series, let me take a quick second to bring you up to speed. This article series is all about building communities. The core tenet is that strong communities benefit both players and developers. We all know that when communities fail--often in spectacular ways (at least to those directly), players quit gaming, and that hurts everyone, including the developers. In the first two D-Mails, we explored some ways that developers can encourage and aid the growth of strong player guilds, clans, and communities. We will certainly touch on many more ways and ideas in upcoming D-Mails.  However, I don't want this to be a one way street. We as players have responsibility in this as well.

In D-Mail #2, the responses by the readers had a clear theme—one which I also believe in passionately. That theme is: good recruiting is the core of a successful guild/community. You could say it the opposite way: when you recruit anything with a pulse, you ultimately set yourself up for failure. So in today's D-Mail we will touch on both the good and bad practices of recruiting and explore some of the common pitfalls that can impact the success of your community.

Having led a massive guild (with more than 620 active people in the major games we play today and over 1000 members in total) since 1996, I have some experience with recruiting. In fact, I have made just about all the mistakes you can make with recruiting. Yet, I have been fortunate enough to have lived to tell about it. We were lucky that we were founded and made most of those recruiting mistakes when MMORPGs were in their infancy and player expectations were much different from what they are today. As such, those mistakes didn't cause a catastrophic implosion, and we were able to learn from them and adapt the recruiting process into the very detailed process that exists today. Unfortunately, I see many of those same mistakes happening every day around us. In today's MMORPG environment, those mistakes often do cause the death of a guild.

The premise behind the right recruiting policy is simple: If you do not recruit people who have the same goals as your community, you are simply creating a ticking time bomb that will probably go off at a very inconvenient time. Guilds exist for different reasons, from power-gaming to casual raiding to PvP to socializing to quest support to crafting to role-playing and other such reasons.  There is no "one size fits all" rule for exactly who you should recruit other than to say you need to recruit people whose goals are exactly in line with the purpose of your entity. That is the golden rule of recruiting.

Now, I did say this article was primarily about player responsibility and not aimed at developers, but a topic for a future D-Mail will be how developers can support communities by having content that does not pressure players into breaking that golden rule of recruiting. In a great many of the MMORPGs out there, players feel pressure to have "X" number of people in A, B, C different classes/roles in order to defeat the content.  That pressure often leads to poor decisions that violate the golden rule of recruiting. That doesn't relieve players of the responsibility to make the right recruiting decisions but again, the more developers can do to support community stability the more successful their games will be.  It is a win-win when the game promotes community development. We’ll dive into this more deeply in a future article.

So, back to the topic of our responsibility as players for having a good recruiting policy, we have all seen the phenomenon of recruiting someone to the guild because we "have to" and not because they are the right person for our team. You can see that manifest itself in a variety of ways.  It can be "we need more XXXX class/role!" and off you go and add the best ones you can find without regard for how they will fit in or what their focus on loot is and how that meshes with your loot policies or how their style of play meshes with how you run raids or PvP. It is critically important to properly evaluate every new member before adding them, especially when you are plugging them into an established team.

Often one ”bad apple” plugged into a good team will have two results. The first is that the bad apple will quit, sometimes in an explosive manner and sometimes dragging friends they made in the guild with them. Second, that explosion can take out a couple of your good members as they either lose confidence in the guild's leadership to make good recruiting decisions or they simply have such a poor experience with the person that they go elsewhere seeking a more positive environment. So while taking the time to find the right people to fill niche spots can cause your current progression through a game to slow down or even stop, in the long run it will prevent far more serious issues and keep your community more stable.