My guild has come a long way since we've taken the initiative to raid harder after the release of BC. However we're still facing some roadblocks that are seemingly impossible to overcome without more recruitment. The issue there is we honestly can't find anyone to recruit!

I've come to wonder what sort of methods other recruiters use to promote their guild. Whether it's spamming some sort of advertisement in city chat, or by posting on the realm/recruitment forums, or /who-ing the classes that you need and attempting to innitiate some sort of conversation that alludes to a plug for your guild?

In our case we've tried all three and so far there's been very little reaction. What else can we try?

If you want to find the undiscovered talent, you should try running PUG 5-mans. We've recently found a few new skilled players for our guild in this way. It can be painful, but you could really find a hidden gem that would be excited to get into a raiding guild. You can also sometimes find good players from other guilds this way. Being pivotal in making a PUG go smoothly might prick the interest of someone that is a little frustrated with their current guild to explore other options.

If any of your members come from lower progressed guilds and are still friends with some of the members, that is an excellent way to steal members.

You can also try the spam general and look for diamonds in the rough, remember to keep them as initiates though and boot them as necessary.

When you run heroics, invite someone from a non-raiding guild/unguilded and see if they are any good. If they are, offer an invitation.

Putting a post on realm forums help as well as the guild recruitment forum for some cross server action.

Plenty of ways, just be creative.

P.S. Sometimes that uber mage isn't worth it when he is bundled with a crap warrior.

One other thing that seems to create interest for your guild is the individuals.
That is ofc. very hard to replicate, but we are lucky enough to have a few people that are well-liked by alot of the server-community making the guild well-known on that basis alone.

The big thing that usually peaques peoples interest is your PVE progression, being registered at some site like bosskillers might generate extra interest, seeing as you can search on a per server basis.

Getting your name out there in some way or another really helps.

in short, merge.

Find guilds about in the same spot and start feeling them out to see if your cultures are compatible. Trial runs, lots of negotiations, and raiding together will give you an idea of who will be a good fit.

How would you prompt the idea in their head though? Do you just bluntly whisper them and say "Hey I know of your guild and we're better. Join us!"?

Another huge issue that I've noticed is that for the classes that we are in the need of (namely healing specced hybrid classes and priests), the majority of candidates prefer not to spec for raids. I don't know what it is about BC but on my server I've noticed an incredible amount of people who just refuse to respec to heal. And those who are specced to heal belong in guilds that are further along in progression than we are. A number of people that I have spoken to would rather stay in their guild because of progression despite the fact that they are not comfortable in their guild.

It seems that progression is the best aphrodisiac for the healers that I've been talking to so far. And we would be progressing if we had more healers so we're just a little dumbfounded. Honestly my only solution at the moment is to have a bunch of our core-raiders re-roll as healers and to recruit more DPS classes.

Your guild is an Aussie guild, right? It's going to be hard to get a healthy roster of people on a West Coast server. We've been stuck on Magtheridon because we simply do not have the Warlocks for it

What?! No we're not! I hope that's not what everybody believes. The base of our raiders are on the west coast. Mostly California / Portland / British Columbia.

Oh, haha. My bad. Not sure what to say then.

It seems to me that a large majority of guilds that have 3-5 SSC kills are pretty much constantly recruiting at the moment.

What does this mean for you? Well, the more guilds that are recruiting, the more competition there is for members of course. With raiding not really providing any meaningful upgrades there's nothing stopping people from applying to a farther progressed guild. I suppose that's not really a solution to your problem, but it's at least my guess as to why you're having trouble. Not to mention all the glaring issues that exist with raiding at the moment. Perhaps 2.1 will spark a greater interest in raiding or maybe even bring back some of the people that quit.

I think your best bet would be to make sure people are aware of your progression but more importantly who you are. Also, explain why people would want to join your guild opposed to the other thousands out there. Having someone write up something that articulates your strengths would probably help. See: We are (mostly) no longer recruiting. for reference.

Being on a server with open transfers also helps. Not much you can do if you're not though.

We recently had a guild merge. There were just not enough people around who we looking for the same kind of stuff on our server in other places. We've had a bit of interest from people on other servers, but w/o transfers there wasn't much to be done.

So I'd back the following:

Look for people in guild who might be frustrated, don't go out and out trying to poach though, maybe run 5 mans and see if there are quality players who might be interested.

Otherwise, perhaps consider a guild merge if there are likely guilds about.

I for one would advise against spamming general/trade channel with your recruitment message, not only does it make your guild look like one of the many "we got a cool tabard" guilds but it also annoys people. Few things frustrate me as much as seeing the same guild recruitment message being spammed over and over.

Posting on the realm forums might work, but you have to realize that the majority of the people reading/posting on those forums are, at least in my experience, either trolls or a select group of players that are the few same people actually bothering with said forums. In other words, there's a huge chance that your post won't get you any where but net you a few completely useless replies. Usally, if you're a horde guild, alliance people posting "lol recruit me", and vice versa if you're an alliance guild in search of new members.

As a good guild, at least better than the average guild on your server, you can always try to pick up players from guilds that haven't progressed as far as you have. Either through personal knowledge of interesting players or through running instances with them , later on commend them on their ability to heal/dps/tank and ask if they might be interested in joining your ranks.

If you really need good players, be sure to let the rest of the guild know, that way they can all be on the look out for possible future guild members. Some one might stumble up on a really skilled player in a pug or a battle ground.

Nah, try and do a little homework about the guild and approach the GM and try to lay out some common groundwork. To paraphrase "hey, we're farming karazhan too, but we need more people to take the next step into 25 mans. Would you be interested in joining forces" only more, um, schmoozy. I suck at it obviously.

Right now, if you have a ton of holy pallies, that's not really a bad thing... As far as it goes, you might want to prompt a few people who are more alt oriented to make a healing toon to play around with. One or two might actually end up liking it better than their main, and even if they don't want to switch, you would have a few pocket healers to pull in if you're in a pinch. That's how my priest started out. Had a blast leveling him as shadow, healing in raids, and pvphealing to rank 13. (he's raiding shadow now, but that's a different story)

Recruit a graphic designer, singer or any other sort of enthusiastic artistic player. No matter how much they fail at the game.

In exchange for managing the website, boosting guild morale and making sure other guilds envy you. Give this special player the occasional raid slot and purple items.

Snowcrasher would confirm this as an extremely viable option to increase guild popularity on the server, and in some cases. World wide.

Social networking is absolutely the way to go. In all likelihood your guild members have friends that enjoy playing the game in the same way they do, some of whom are either unguilded, or dissatisfied with their current guilds. Get them into some guild Heroic runs to test their skills - both performance-wise and socially - and offer them a raid invite if they seem like decent folk. It's the best way to ensure you get quality members, without having to sift through applications that read like they were written by fifth graders.

No no no and no. It will only end in tears, my guild is still suffering from it over a year on and it's still brought up in arguments/discussions. We had a split officer core from both guilds and I ended up running things and I still get conflicts between the two old guilds sometimes (although mostly is calmed down now), what looks like a swimmingly run joint raid for a few weeks will turn into a big ol favourtism battle longer down the road.

Best thing to draw members I find, is current members. Friends of friends within the guild usually or picking up people through 5 man content seems to be the best way imo. I would say actually getting through some content helps draw some people towards your recruitment pages but they tend to just see "x guild is killing x boss ... oooh ph4t l00t" rather than a hard working guild trying to progress that they want to be a part of.

There is always an exception to the rule though

Our officers just spammed the hell out of Realm forums (and got a few daily bans for it). Now we're 10-20 or so members stronger and fielding 2 Kara groups and almost having 3.

These days I think its simpler. Run PUG heroics, see who is putting in the time, has the skill, and isn't associated with one of the other raid guilds yet.

No one answer though.

Are you sure? You sound somewhat reluctant. You should come do a trial run with us, just feel us out. Maybe you'll like the switch. Sure we're slightly behind but we expect to catch right up once we can make our numbers a little stronger. Transfer over to KJ and find out. ... ... :| ...

I'd like to hear more from people who have experiences with guild mergers. Have they generally gone well? What are the potential problems other than trivial stuff like "who's gonna merge into who"?

It depends alot on your server, i think.

Our server has a very slow progression (no SSC / TK kills so far, only 2 guilds downed Gruul, 3 Maulgar...).

Imho the best way to generate interest is success.

Clear Karazhan, slay Maulgar/Gruul and dont be arrogant to non guild members. Play with them and treat them normally. It's no problem if someone does not know anything, as long as he wants to learn it.

Because my old guild broke up and three of us were not happy with the previous leadership, we skipped their new guild and created our own. After three weeks (with 1-2 randoms from friends list) we were the first guild on our server that cleared Karazhan. When we had 13 active members in our guild, we started running Maulgar/Gruul with randoms and even had the server first Gruul kill this way. Now we are 20 members, running 2 Karazhan groups and not far away from doing Gruul internally and stepping to SSC.

I think the most important thing is how your recruitement is done. There are guilds that invite every class they need and a few weeks later, they decide if they keep or kick those members. Very hierarchical approach and imho not based on a good feeling for everyone. Some even forbid those initiands to roll or bid for drops...

We decided only to invite players if everyone in the guild has nothing against them, and if the majority has played with them and wants to have them in the guild. If someone is really interested in us, we will take him with us to Gruul or into heroic instances and see if he plays well and if we like him.

Don't accept "packet" invites (except in a few cases). Don't let them put pressure on you - better drop one week of raiding instead of inviting troublemakers and players you don't like. Follow a straight, target-oriented invite policy and decide carefully which classes are needed, but do it slow and steady. We invited ~2 persons a week now and are fine with this approach. Most raided with us before, or were on our friendslists for a long time.

Taking "randoms" into raids like Maulgar/Gruul/Karazhan is not easy. They might do mistakes, the runs take longer, you have to explain everything again and again... it might take hours until a 50% random Gruul raid fills. But in terms of finding competent new members and of seeing if someone is good enough or not, it's the best thing you can do.

A good player who never had the chance to play in a raid group which knows how to play and who is stuck in some casual guild that does not allow him to reach his own goals, will be more than happy to join you, if he once experienced the fun playing with you.

In my experience most guild mergers end in tears. Now this could be due to a number of reasons, but I've seen it happen more times then I can remember. When two guilds merge together, they usally do so because they both have run in to some sort of problems. These problems can be, amongst others, lack of a certain class (healers most of the time), guild drama (conflicts that made people leave), not enough/quick enough progress through content. I can see why people think that a simple guild merge will solve these issues, since you'll get a bunch of new people to play with. But from what I've seen the new guilds usally don't last long.

A guild is often formed for a reason, with a goal in mind, you recruit people and build around this. If you merge with another guild, you really have to make sure that both guilds closely resemble each other in terms of goals and visions for what you want to achieve. The first problem that comes to my mind about a merge is who do you kick and who gets to stay on board for the new guild? Or are you going to simply merge two 70 characters guilds in to one huge guild. If you don't kick people, you'll end up with the usual whining about who gets to go to raids and who doesn't. If you decide to go for a larger guild, make sure not to create A and B teams/raids, so to speak. Since this practice is a sure way of making people feel useless and does nothing for the guild, unless you think you can use it as a way of forcing people to shape up and do better (Only works if you really know that the players in question can handle it).