Time to recruit again?

[sybarite]

Hey gang,
I think it would be cool if we could field 2 teams of 8 so we could effectively guild scrim. This would allow us to get lots of GvG practice, which I think would be helpful, as well as give us a ready testing ground for build ideas.

Are we big enough already? Should we look to bring more people into the fold? Discuss.

Topic for discussion: If we want to field 2 teams of 8, how many more active players would we actually need to pick up. Ten? Twelve?

[Khunlin]

I think this kind of thing is where an alliance would be most useful. We could keep our guild small and close-knit, while having a larger pool of players to draw upon for missions, HA, Scrims, etc. I don't think the Republic would be the same if we doubled in size...

[Malae]

I think we could use a couple more people around, our activity has dropped off a bit with some reliable members. I wouldn't want to see 8+ join though. As for Guild scrimming, i've brought it up in the past, and nobody seems keen on it. Losing to guildmates is demoralizing and not fun. (Apparently, being as dealage as I am, i've never lost )
I think it's time we proactively looked for a good alliance.

[Delor]

Yes! An alliance would be good. I think we should post what we are wanting from an alliance.

Delor's needs from this relationship:

Semi or fully active in both HA and GvG
Similar or larger size
Vent/TS users
Pleasant attitude, willing to teach instead of 00b-call.
Willing to get their buttocks handed to them at least once a week by the glorious Republic in an unranked GvG match

EDIT: Was I mistaken or did Taniss seem interested after we did the deep?

[Triia]

It might not hurt to add a few new people to the guild. I'm not sure whether we'd be better off with some casual recruiting of people we meet while playing (by all means, keep your eyes open for them!) or active recruiting on the forums.

I'm thinking that it would be good to have a casual alliance, though I'm still not sure what the best way would be to find one. With all the new ideas we've been working on for GvG, it would be nice to have somewhere besides TA to do testing (I know we're not about rank, but wow, was it fun to watch it get cut in half the other night ).

And besides unranked GvG and the occasional addition to a team, what would we want out of the alliance? There was a small group that we were in contact with for a while, shortly after Factions came out. They contacted me fairly often, asking what we were up to and pretty much every time we were in the middle of or just about to start doing something together. Unsurprisingly, they eventually stopped asking. Maybe an official alliance would be different.

In any case, I'd like to hear more opinions.

[sybarite]

My thoughts on...your thoughts:

"We could keep our guild small and close-knit"

These two qualities are not mutually exclusive. This I know from experience. I have been in a guild that had 25 very active members and we were definitely close-knit. I think close-knit is the feature we want to preserve. Keep in mind that having a close-knit guild simply requires that we have people of a similar mind who actually log in and play regularly. That is not difficult to maintain if we were to get another 8 regular players.
[if you're curious about why I am not with my aforementioned close-knit large guild, I actually still have contact with them but they wanted to continue playing The Matrix Online and I felt that that game truly sucked so I had to move on. Some of them tried GW but didn't stick around.]

"I wouldn't want to see 8+ join though."

Specifically, why not? Sure there is a period of enculturation when new people join so we should be careful but it's definitely doable.

"As for Guild scrimming, i've brought it up in the past, and nobody seems keen on it. Losing to guildmates is demoralizing and not fun. "

This isn't true. I for one am for it. I guess it depends on your attitude, but in my Matrix Online days we often had part of the guild go with another faction so we could PvP against each other and we had a blast. Perhaps some of the best PvP was when it was purely amongst us. It also provided us with a ton of learning experiences and the chance to really explore different builds and team compositions. I never thought of it as "losing" to my guildmates I always thought of it as playing with them.

"I'm not sure whether we'd be better off with some casual recruiting of people we meet while playing or active recruiting on the forums."

This is a major stumbling block in my mind. Whatever we decide, actually finding the people we want may be difficult.

I see the advantages to joining an Alliance but I think it would be better if we could keep it more 'in-house' and expand the guild. Once again the major hurdle would be finding the type of people we want. We have organization issues when we want to plan events now. It's much easier to plan in-guild events than cross guild events.

I'm sure I won't sway anyone to the idea of making us significantly bigger but I'd like to see us continue the discussion. This ties into how everyone sees the guild and where we want the guild to go. Personally I'd like to see us more active in all aspects of PvP, getting a respectable guild rank and occasionally taking Halls. With our current size I don't know if that's feasible.

[Triia]

delor said:

EDIT: Was I mistaken or did Taniss seem interested after we did the deep?

No, I believe you were correct.

[Malae]

Keeping the guild relatively small is one of the things that appeals to me, and many others in this guild. The amount of work to keep a large guild going is not something I want to do. It's difficult to organize 12 of us, I don't want to try 25.

Syb, I think me and you are alone when it comes to guild scrimming. I enjoy it, back in my Starcraft days where I lead my clan, we had games against eachother all the time and I loved it. But different people feel differently and the majority of people here do not like scrimming against guildmates.

Of course 8 more people is doable, but I still don't want it. You've said you don't want people saying what's mandatory in your leisure time, and I agree. I like my leisure time. Recruiting is work. It's not fun and it takes alot of time. I'll still do it, because it is necessary. But since we're so picky about members, it's a long process. Look at our last recruiting drive, Triia and I did alot of work on it. We got a few members but the biggest success of that drive was you, Drum, and Bryce. 3 solid members out of alot of contacts, meetings and screenings. Ignoring the actual act of recruiting, the reason I don't want another 8 people is because that's too many for me. I don't want 6-7 people feeling left out of guild events because we have too many people.

As to our current size being feasible to your wants from the guild (winning halls, respectable rank.) It is actually quite possible, in fact, not many large guilds are top PvP competitors. Most of the top 100 guilds have 8-10 people in them, and that's it. Granted we're not that hardcore, but we have enough to get a group of 8 together and go do HA/GvG.

[Kaiser]

I agree, Malae. The last recruiting drive was a lot of work, even for me, and all I did was search forums and pass names on to you and Triia. I have nothing against scrimming guildmates, but I can see where others might. It is hard for Jupiter when I burn her to death

If we want more people, I'm beginning to think that an alliance is the way to go. Now you know I'm not all that in favor of alliances, since I really don't see the point. However, if my choice is between recruiting 8 more players and forming an alliance with 10-20, I think the latter option is best. I don't think I would want to join up with an established alliance with 4 other guilds, but just one or two would be ok, as long as they aren't 00bs.

If we want to add guild members, I think we should just do what we usually do and be open to it when we meet qualified people in-game, rather than doing an all out recruiting drive again. It is a method that has worked well for us in the past, and we get good quality people when we do it. The complaint I've heard lately about the size of the guild is that nobody stays on late enough anymore for the west coasters. I would like ot remind you that in the next month, most of the west coasters will be going back to school, and won't be staying up as late either. Well, maybe...