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How often do WvW guilds recruit people from outside WvW?


FrigginPaco.4178

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Specifically, how often are WvW guilds interested in training or marshalling more players into WvW? For some time now WvW chats have stated that they've lost lots of players. Sometimes when I look at team chat I'm reminded that some of it is server-hopping.

OK.

Is there any desire or initiative to recruit from outside? One would assume that this is how it's done in some way, but I find that there are a lot of players who take a "revolving door" approach and hop servers to join guilds and play that way. Ignoring the implications of alliances since they are not live at the time of this post, the "jump ship" bandwagon appears to be how most WvW guilds acquire new members.

So...

Very few people would say PvE has a small population, and I would suggest perhaps looking there for new people. Why? I recently added some members to my guild who were completely disillusioned with any competitive formats. Slowly over the last several months I have managed to get them to tag along with a group of us and they've since expressed their increasing appreciation for the game mode and the guild as well. I am often reminded by them that if it weren't for the group of people they play with, they would probably not have given the game mode a shot. So coming back full-circle, I wonder why it doesn't appear that people want to try to recruit from outside since that's where all the manpower is.

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I guess I just don't understand how the answer to "low pop" is just outside the door. Of course, it is naturally better to get someone who is already interested. Sometimes a guild recruit pans out, and other times it doesn't. Plus, one would conceivably only need to do it in waves and take a break, pick up the megaphone and do it again. It's the same thing people need to do to fill out positions anywhere else in life. Need people? Find people, they may not be perfect, but sometimes it's the way it goes.

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Why do i even want to spend my time and effort on convincing and teaching someone who i dont really know yet how much they wanna contribute to the group?

Ofc I am always willing to teach or answer any questions as long as people show me their real dedication. I dont mind being wiped with them if they show me their efforts and their will.

But No, I will never try to convince ppl i never know to play wvw. It's just a waste of time for both of us.

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There are several reasons why this is difficult. Take a journey with me, let's pretend that you have been throwing out recruitment messages in PvE land and you have finally gotten someone talking to you about joining. First issue, they might not be on your server, meaning you will either have to point them to where they can find a WvW guild or encourage them to transfer. Transfer fees are expensive for your casual player, and it is asking a lot of them to transfer to a server when they are new to WvW. Most people will not do so.

Say they are on your server, what then? Well, then you walk them through the typical recruitment requirements such as discord, and guild builds. Now, let's say this person is a casual player, guild builds, and the idea of downloading discord is a lot. You are asking them to make gear specifically for a game mode they have never played or have only dabbled in. They don't even know if they like it.

So if they agree to the requirements, tell you they will work on gearing, and you give them a guild invite then you need to take time to train them. Don't get me wrong, I am more than willing to help out new people and spend a good chunk of my time doing so but say you manage to find three new guildies that have never played WvW before. You need to explain to them how to play, what objectives are, how to stay on tag, what callouts mean, needless to say it is a large chunk of time.

The biggest issue is that these people that you are trying to recruit in PvE need to have enough of a thirst for the game mode to keep them going though all of the gearing, the learning, and the many times that they will die because they are familiar with where their stun break is. You could put in all that time and the player could decide the game mode is too much for them, they could have real life pop up and they have to leave the game, they could be disheartened due to a bad matchup. All that time that you have invested in them can go to waste quite easily.

You have brought up an interesting idea though, if there was a way to reach these people, particularly the people who are on your server such as some kind of server chat it would make the process a bit easier because you could find potential new recruits or even lead some kind of event for them so they can get a taste of WvW. Megaservers have kind of taken away the ability to do that.

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@fewfield.7802 said:Why do i even want to spend my time and effort on convincing and teaching someone who i dont really know yet how much they wanna contribute to the group?

Ofc I am always willing to teach or answer any questions as long as people show me their real dedication. I dont mind being wiped with them if they show me their efforts and their will.

But No, I will never try to convince ppl i never know to play wvw. It's just a waste of time for both of us.

This pretty much. It can end up in hours of wasted time. You want to recruit people in wvw,and especially hand pick them if you see certain people doing well.

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It's an obsolete concept since the introduction of megaservers.The other problem is unless you're doing instanced content such as fractals or raids most people are spamming 1 , unless you're in an area that has less than 15 people in it.Let's say for example you find a PvE player , then what? Unless they are playing revenant or spellbreaker (berserker is usable) they will need new gear (trinkets at least). Typical healing builds don't run minstrel in PvE.

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Depends on the guild... The question is very subjectional.

You have the bandwagonner that is to lazy to put any effort in and just jumps to blackgate/or the latest fad for the hard carry..

You have the close of groups that do nothing but wvw and fights.. And attempt to fill a void of content for gvg, tend to not openly recruit but approach player they are impressed by.

You have the guilds that try to build community on the server that they are on. So they want to include all of their community so yeah they tend to openly recruit people.

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@Liston.9708 said:

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:this used to be a common occurrence before megaservers. its how I got started.

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:this used to be a common occurrence before megaservers. its how I got started.

On yaks bend, dragun knight would pop into Lions Arch all the time to rally the troops. As noted above, megaservers killed that

And I remember wvw people telling Anet to at least make Lion's Arch "fixed" (Sorry I can't think of a better term.) in that every server has their own LA instance.

But nope.

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@borgs.6103 said:

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:this used to be a common occurrence before megaservers. its how I got started.

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:this used to be a common occurrence before megaservers. its how I got started.

On yaks bend, dragun knight would pop into Lions Arch all the time to rally the troops. As noted above, megaservers killed that

And I remember wvw people telling Anet to at least make Lion's Arch "fixed" (Sorry I can't think of a better term.) in that every server has their own LA instance.

But nope.Yep, that was one of the initial reactions to megaservers - at least offer some way to join "your server" in a central hub such as LA (or cities in general). Anet never seem to care about that. The roleplaying community in particular took a massive hit.
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@FrigginPaco.4178 said:Specifically, how often are WvW guilds interested in training or marshalling more players into WvW? For some time now WvW chats have stated that they've lost lots of players.A couple of notes:

  1. Traditionally there have been a number of different types of guilds populating the game mode. They all recruit and act in different ways. For some of those, recruitment starts where other elements in the mode has laid the ground work. There used to be specific guilds that marshalled players into WvW as PvX guilds or as more dedicated WvW training guilds. They were among the first ones to leave over the glaring core systems problems. Let's look at those.

  2. The mode still operates on a server- and queue system. If a server is full you can not bring new players onboard with you. If the maps are full, you have to wait to play. That alone is extremely detrimental to getting true new players to play the game mode. In fact, it has an opposite effect, letting players from outside games pull existing players out of this mode/game for social reasons. If they can't play together here, they play together elsewhere. For example, I am trying WoWC now, even though I absolutely loathe the levelling experience only because one of my GW2 communities (guild) decided to play it together. My friends is the only reason I play that and not this.

  3. The megaserver system split the community. What most people don't remember today is that EotM was initially less about the map and more about the underlying system of bringing some sort of megaserver-adaptation to WvW. It was an inferior version to the actual megaservers (and/or what players suggested at a time, but that stubborn approach to things is still the norm; Anet has always been hellbent on proving that they know better than what the players are suggesting but keep failing at it or never reach implementation of it) and when the project looked to be failing (mostly because of the map or it being disconnected from the other systems within WvW, such as scoring) they abandoned it rather than trying to salvage it.

Alliances are essentially EotM 2.0 (pairing only ad hoc). This split between PvE servers and WvW servers has been extremely harmful for internal recruitment from other modes since people can't bring their guilds into WvW when PvE guilds looking to go PvX are split over all the god damned WvW servers.

As discussed in recent Reddit threads, that is also extremely harmful to new-player interaction because the natural way of organising guilds and bringing those communities into WvW is also how new commanders are given birth and new players helped with actual ingame tools. That is the reason why PvX guilds died out and server-community guilds replaced them, creating the current dependence on fewer and fewer players as well as this move over to mass-management/security/meta-game tools that tend to create a barrier of entry for new players. That's why we have all this bickering over meta-builds and getting on voice communications or not and the toxicity of /map and /team channels. If you are to organize a whole server, you do that or drown in chores.

My first guild in this game was a 300-member PvX guild that excelled at marshalling new players into WvW through simple guild events. There was no outspoken agenda to shuttle players in or train them, it was just a natural part of playing WvW together with such an unspecialized guild - a typical, general MMO guild. That entire guild quit overnight and followed leadership elsewhere in 2014, after they got tired of the negligence of core WvW gameplay (namely scoring and queues). That was even before EotM. There is absolutely no reason to still have those systems in 2019, that is pure meow neglect and wasted potential (of going down in history as the #1 RvR game ever). I still interact with that community, it just doesn't play GW2 anymore because of all this guffaw. The mode does not encourage community building, a cornerstone of MMO. Solving it is not prioritized, they may talk about it in a few months.

So, we can't recruit from other games, we can't recruit from in the game, the primary objectives of the mode is still chiefly determined by when people should be asleep, at work or in school - a sharp contrast to the game's outspoken ideal of being social, casual, friendly and responsible. When we do play we are sometimes not allowed on to the maps, because they are full, especially not if our friends are popular among the community at large and create larger than normal queues to the maps they play. All of this makes people quit and it made the marshalling/PvX/helpful guilds quit first. Who had friendly casual commanders with a large following to create queues? those guilds. The groups that remain are far deeper dug into the mode and far more exclusive. There is absolutely no reason to be where we are at and at the same time no wonder why we are where we are at. A dug hole.

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Our guild actively recruits from our internal PvE players for WvW. We help them with picking a profession that they will enjoy playing but is also beneficial for our static squad, we help them gear up: sometimes with gold, sometimes showing them how to farm the easiest gear. Some of us will take them into the raid golem to practice. We help them transfer to our server and run dismounted until new joins have their warclaw. We explain what we are doing and why. Most importantly we treat our new WvW players with respect and patience as they learn the mode. The result of this consistent approach is that we retain most of those whom we introduce to WvW. It works for us.

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People play games for different reasons. Some play to kill other players, others play to make equipment, others play for skin wars and to socialise with other players. As a game mode, wvw offers little to the bulk of gw2 players, its the forgotten part of the game. The only reason most pve players even enter it is to grind out the gift of battle and memories of battle for their legendary weapons. Ask yourself, why play wvw for little to no rewards when i can do anything else for so much more loot?

I play the game because i like making items and gearing up characters in blingy items. I do a couple of hours a week wvw repeating the gift of battle reward track everytime and completing a number of wvw dailies needing to complete the dailies for the 2g, outside of this, the vast bulk of my gold comes from doing fractals and open world farming.

The only way to fix the dwindling wvw population is for anet to support the game mode, which hasnt been done for a long time.

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@Liston.9708 said:

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:this used to be a common occurrence before megaservers. its how I got started.

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:this used to be a common occurrence before megaservers. its how I got started.

On yaks bend, dragun knight would pop into Lions Arch all the time to rally the troops. As noted above, megaservers killed that

And then he resorted to having a giant contact list and would PM everyone on that list. :/

Megaservers were the first death blow to WvW.

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They should build some type of tutorial mode on a simulated map with siegeraiser leading a small grp to attack a tower or defend an objective with important information scripted to let people know what is expected.They could also bribe commanders or use the devs on guild chat once a week to show interested people what it is like to play.Buy, yeah, megaserver kinda ruined pve recruitment.

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As I see it, on one hand, it seems like a good chunk of people who're in the convo here have no interest at all in making the effort for their own reasons. On the other, many would certainly like to do so, but feel quite handicapped by the organization structuring of worlds as they exist right now.

One of the big reasons I even asked the question was because I was a bit startled at the indifference exhibited by each respective community at large towards the other. PvE, PvP, WvW in general, not to mention that there are more or less hardcore people out there within each of those communities at well. For example, people who are in it to play how they want in PvE as opposed to fractals or raid players let's say. Fight guilds contrary to roamers or havoc guilds, large zerg guilds (which have reduced in number for many reasons), etc.

So my thought was to see the perspective of people who mainly did WvW and see what the reality was for those players, basically, you all. In the spirit of full disclosure, I play WvW most frequently between PvE story beats I alternate between PvP and WvW when I feel bored with one mode. I'm only rank 920 at this moment and I know that's more of a measure of time than anything. It's a difficult reality to experience in the competitive modes, for about 5 years now. 5 of the 7 of the existence of the game.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would genuinely like to see people from different modes come together in a large melee over Hills or Garrison. I just thought that recruitment would be an exciting prospect for people. Maybe it used to be, but hopefully the alliances are poised to fix a good portion of this exact problem as it stands.

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I presumed server hopping was how guilds lost members who didn't feel like xfering and also links breaking every 2 months. It's been my experience anyhow.

Left fate when they delinked and left strm when they transfered. Got bored solo roaming and had no one to play with that was competent so I xfered from hod to fc and now I am stuck in t1.

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@Justine.6351 said:I presumed server hopping was how guilds lost members who didn't feel like xfering and also links breaking every 2 months. It's been my experience anyhow.

Left fate when they delinked and left strm when they transfered. Got bored solo roaming and had no one to play with that was competent so I xfered from hod to fc and now I am stuck in t1.

Yeah, it's got to be a drag to move at your guilds behest, especially since moving to those more populous servers has the problems of... well room... and cost since it's 1800 gems to move to a high pop server. Definitely not an insignificant amount... Its got to be a coordinated move and everything and... it's often more trouble than it's worth.

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I think most PVE'rs would love wvw if they tried it. It is just really hard to get started and know what to do.EOTM use to be a great 'training ground' for wvw but is mostly desolate now days due to lack of pips.I am sure some PVE players have found it toxic when trying to play (for example during warclaw intro) and getting yelled at for placing siege on the edge or taking up a que spot....but que's are much fewer and farther between now.ANET just really needs to dangle more wvw only shinies to attract more people. Perhaps the next legendary trinkets, rings, necks will have a large wvw contribution. who knows. Good for you for making an effort.

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