Guilds in games are requiring potential guild mates to have specific raiding experience in previous games. In WildStar currently, there are many spam posts that list specific raiding achievements in other games that they require for you to join their guild in WildStar. It’s a really scary trend that we, as a community, need to stop enabling.

Here is the issue at hand with this requirement. It’s limiting the community’s ability to process new players into raiding guilds. By trying to “pre-game” or “pre-load” a guild with experienced raiders from other games, you create a situation of stagnation. There is maybe one or two players, with previous raid experience, that is going to bother to maybe talk to you, and their involvement in your guild is going to be fleeting at best.

The reason is this, there is a very limited number of players in each game that reach prestige level achievements. The ones that do are considered, ultimately, professional gamers by some parts of gaming society. They’re the ones who spend 5 hours a week, 5 hours a day grinding away at bosses, then dedicating the entire weekend to farming gold and tweaking their character.

The process is super simple for why a lot of guilds are having trouble recruiting. A group of a few players (anywhere from say one to ten) get together and they start talking about how awesome they were in games. Like anyone playing a game, they embellish a little, say things they may or may not have done in the game, and all have these massive we’re awesome egos. So, since they as a group think they’re pretty much top tier highest level raid kings, all with this devilish plot to use each other to get to the top.

So, obviously, since the guild is now full of top tier talent, they need to recruit additional top tier talent. Thus they come up with a plan on how to filter the players they do and don’t want out. Since there is no way to measure how good someone is in WS this early in the game, especially for guilds working on starting content, you just say you want a hardcore raider from another game. Thus, previous raiding experience required.

Since they are culling those without raiding experience in other games, they now limit their potential recruits to people who have played other MMOs. Which, I guess, makes sense if they’re all MMO veterans. But then they limit it further to usually players with prestige achievements. You need to basically be the top 1% of the top 1% of raiders who were able to down a boss within a week of every world first. This limits the potential players to like 5 online at any given time on all servers.

Once a player, who has this experience, inquires, they’re treated like trash by the players who all gather together and think they’re all awesome. They question the person, they needle at them, and they usually just push them away. I don’t know why - there is an alternative - and that is they sometimes in earnest try to do the content (after they pug the remaining slots) and everything is thrown out on the table, everyone’s skill is shown, and in most cases the excuses begin on why they wipe and can’t make progress.

Thus a lesson in futility is learned. Yet, this process is repeating itself at an alarming rate. So many guilds are trying to recruit top tier talent on this mystical idea that the few people who came together were ultimately top tier talent when, they were in fact, middle tier average dudes who have enough time to put into the game to get places, but those places aren’t world firsts. Which usually makes up the vast majority of the raiders in any game.

The same applies to arena teams, warplot guilds, or RBG teams. They usually change tune of their story as they're begging for high warlords and no one comes answering. Ultimately the same thing happens, but on a much smaller scale, and with less people frustrated (usually). 

So how does this hurt the game you ask? For new job seekers, the dreaded “2-years experience required” or whatever amount of years for every job listing imaginable creates a situation where you tilt your head to the side and ask well how do you get experience if no one will accept anyone without it? This creates an issue where guilds are not able to recruit equal level talent within games.

I realize I can be coming off a bit like a jerk by saying that people think too highly of themselves, and this may in fact just be a thinly veiled attempt to tell people to get off their high horses, but at the same time it’s just a rough reality that a lot of gamers and raiders are just mediocre at best. I consider myself to be in that position because I don’t have a lot of time to specifically dedicate to one game or another. I stay up late nights playing WildStar to get more game time in, sacrificing sleep.

A guild that recruits above their talent will always disappoint new recruits, fail to complete content (due to an ego issue), and ultimately break apart. Players in the community seeking guilds have to fight these egos while they’re guild searching and either fabricate a background in raiding (causing hilarious issues when it gets time to raid) or be disappointed that it’s hard to get your foot in the door in what’s becoming a more and more clique based community.

With all that said, you can all continue to set high standards and create long recruitment forms for your guilds. You can sit in cities like Illium and spam all day long that you’re looking for people who killed Kel’thuzad in vanilla WoW. You can ask for the impossible, but at the end of the day you’re going to have a bad time and the community is going to suffer for it. Whatever anyone does, supporting this continued behavior should be considered hindering any game community, unless the guild is actually recruiting top-tier talent with top-tier players, but I often find those guilds don’t need to spam trade chat to get people to join them.


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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