We experienced the same thing. Pre-TBC people had two years (or in our case on a newish server, about 9 months) to distinguish themselves via progression. People generally go for a guild at their current level of gameplay. New people tend to not want to get in too deep and look for MC guilds, experienced players would be looking to join guilds where their last guild was at, say BWL, AQ, or various stages of Naxx. There was plenty of stratification to differentiate and as a result guilds toward the higher end usually had a somewhat steady of stream of random apps, and could generate a decent amount of apps through Realm Forums or Recruitment forums.

Post-TBC the playing field was leveled. You could advertise your Pre-TBC progression in your recruiting posts, and we did try that, in order to get some differentiation, but it didn't matter. For the first two months our inbox was completely dry. The few people we got were friends of current members. They turned out great, but still it was just enough for us to get by.

Thankfully we didn't suffer much attrition like many other guilds did from December to February and we were to get some important bosses dead. We've been able to gather steam since and once again stand out from the crowd, and the apps have definitely picked up since then and we get 1-3 a day just from random stoppers by.

We're still completely dry of applicants and now members are beginning to riot. So far I've come accross some Paladins who aren't too keen on their guilds (or are guildless) but it's mainly because they wish to remain retribution spec.

One said he'd be willing to heal but only after he received "the game's best healing mace". I asked him which mace it was and where it dropped, he didn't know - but he did know it was an epic. /smackhead

Public groups are hands down the best way to find interested players and be able to directly observe their attitude (most important) and skill. Likewise, every guild on a server is going to have people that either have mains or alts that need stuff from non-raid instances or help on quests or farming buddies so it shouldn't really be hard to create a pretty nice web of contacts who themselves may know other people who may be interested in joining your guild.

Not to mention, you might meet people that are just fun to group and tool around with that would take the edge off the tedium of raiding/grinding.

What I least recommend is batch recruiting and mergers. Mergers can lead to colossal differences of opinion and you'll have instant cliques that will need to be broken up. Batch recruiting will generally net you people that are loot-ambitious or trolls, both I would qualify as temp players.

Originally, I disliked the idea of private apps. After reading the previous responder's post, and thinking for awhile on it, I had to come to the conclusion that private apps shouldn't be held against the applyer. At the risk of bringing the drama llama, let us pretend I'm speaking about a hypothetical server with a hypothetical guild like mine and then some completely made up other guilds, Horde side.

There's the top Horde guild (hello there), lead by a giant jerkface (hello there). You (for all cases of you being "a random applicant")'re not in it, but that's okay, you're with pals and having fun raiding / enjoy earning your progress / hate that jerkface, Daksuo.

Something happens - your third week of Curator wipes convinces someone to go home. Your tenth person says, "This is all the loot I'm getting in the foreseeable future, I'll secretly disappear for a month or two while they figure this out, then come back for my loots." Whatever. A paladin took cloth +healing. JimmyTheJerkface finally found that last straw, and a camel's back broke.

Now you're not raiding, earning your own progress, or your hatred of JimmyTheJerkface is essentially equivelent to Daksuo, so what's keeping you where you are?

Let's throw on an extra layer - there's one or two guys in your guild that show up half the time. So you're not stock out of luck, but whether you raid tonight, or tomorrow or the day after is a random shot, and hey, you don't know until the raid leader decides to call it because noone showed.

Okay, painted the picture thoroughly, right?

What's a cost:benefits analysis of our options here give us? Doing nothing costs nothing, and yields the benefit of at least half the time raiding, as unpleasant as it may be. The alternative, apply to another (your/my) guild, has the associated cost of 0 raiding, and the very real possibility of rejection.

That's HUGE to someone who enjoys raiding. You *give it up* outright (you gonna keep a raider who is apped to someone else?), and only get a marginal chance of getting it back if and only if you happen to get lucky enough to be accepted?'

I don't mean to bash anyone, as I have gone from both perspectives in the very recent past, but having thought from the applicant's point of view... I just can't say I can hold the public-applicants-only-or-it-looks-bad and not feel guilty, feasting in a land of famine.

Not that any of that is on point for the OP.

Have you tried running PUGs? I'm also terribly curious about your server stats - after reading that post by Humility of Auchindoun... at some point, when do you just decide the server is beneath critical mass?

As mentioned above, I'm not having any luck finding compotent players via PUGs. Our server stats (from what I gather) are something around the realm of 3:1 Alliance:Horde - Home of the Flying Hellfish who are (or were) a top tier world class guild, so our server isn't a stranger to quick progression.

The problem with our server (on Horde side at least) is that it's one of the oldest servers around. Most everyone who plays on KJ is fairly old-school and have a lot of deep ties/connections amongst tightly knit crews. Guilds like mine that havn't seen progression and aren't amongst the popular kids are forced to consider the 12 year olds that many other guilds happily declined.

It almost seems like server transfers are our only hope, but even most of them go straight for the big guilds like FHF as soon as they transfer over. Only after they've been rejected by everyone else will they come to us and the ones that have been filtered that far down are just troublesome (IE: Paladin who will only heal with "the best healing mace in the game").

It sounds like you're not having much luck converting your casual players into raiders. KJ is a launch day server that stayed med-to-high pop, so like other old-school realms (I'd wager) we have a pretty low influx of new blood, and the heightened requirements of BC raiding only exacerbate the problem of finding experienced players. You basically end up with what talent there is spread out among too many guilds.

Whoever said that batch recruiting and mergers were the worst idea has never run a smaller raiding guild. Yeah, you're gonna get some idiots sometimes, but certainly in no larger a ratio than the general populace; the fact that they were a) previously in a guild or b) have friends is a pretty significant social advantage (not saying much, but still). One or two people trickling in from the forums per month isn't going to sustain a small guild's endgame progress when you don't have bleeding-edge content to attract people with.

The best additions to our guild were small-to-medium batch pickups and guild mergers. Every single time we've done it, we've picked up at least a handful of people with good attitudes who are interested in progression. Sure, you get cliques with some friends who are more casual than others, but the important part is that you're getting fresh blood who are up for raiding because they didn't have the opportunity in their guild of buddies. Cliques never get broken up, but if you project the right attitude they get integrated. Loot-ambitious people get dealt with individually. Trolls, well.. they get marginalized or accepted depending on the mentality of guild you run. :p

Partnering up with a guild of the same size should accomplish the same goals, if nobody is looking to merge. If your guild is the one that gets Borg'ed - well, you lost the guild name, but hopefully you've picked up into a larger community with much better prospects for progression, which should be more important.

Have you tried the Guild Recruitment forum to try and track down some applicants from other servers? That seems like it will be your only source of potential applicants. Write up a good post, keep it bumped, and hopefully you'll get some interest.

We did (several times) and had 1 app ever.

I'm afraid its german, but even if you can't understand the text, the format should show that we dont just spam "U wann join me guilt, nub??!" -> http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread....85028733&sid=3

Same goes for our homepage ( www.chival.de ).

We tried everything - Realmforums, recruitment channel, etc.
And just as I write this I read the threads of two more guys in our realmforum that say good bye and leave us.

So... another 6 "famous" players just left the server. Maybe I should try to tell my guild to transfer somewhere too, but I doubt many will do that.

I hope its no too off topic, but if anyone has expirienced the same and found a solution, let me know.


Edit: already 8 in the last 24 hours *sighs*

As a former raider whos gone casual but still checks the recruitment forums for a daytime raiding guild, I can say I have never seen so many high powered guilds recruiting as right now (even during the dark Naxx days when people were leaving wow left and right). Its crazy how many 4/6 SSC posts I see or how many of the top 100 progression guilds are recruiting.

The good news is I think Blizzard is acutely aware of some of these server issues, they haven't introduced new servers for 5 months now. I believe they have some plans on how they want to funnel new players into the game/server system, part of the reason why no new servers. Definitely some server consolidation is called for as well, there are simply too many servers now for the number of people playing. Patch 2.1.0 should also bring some excitement (lots of new content) and people back, and I think thats under a month from going live at this point.