I couldn't agree more. I play with my mates more than anything else. Only way I'd ever leave the server was if they all did. Even if I was going to raid hardcore 5+ nights a week I'd rather do that on the same server. Seems to me anyone willing to jump server to a completely new group of people just to get to a marginally more top raid guild, has not had the positive of MMORPG experiences.

Oh, edit - and for what it's worth, the pop imbalance on my EU server is about as bad as it gets. It's something like 8-1 in terms of toons, and I think 4 or 5 to 1 in terms of active players. There are 3 Nef guilds, one of those has just downed TwinEmps, but all of them are losing players to summertime fun, and alliance side (the argument being it is much easier to get full epix on ally side....), which makes the imbalance even worse. Horde-wise, outside of the guys I play with, it's getting increasingly full of kiddies, as all the muppets who can't get a raid guild ally side come to Horde gradually. On the positive side at least horde have instant BG up constantly.

Meh, just writing it makes me think of trying to get everyone to transfer, but we're on a PvE realm & most of the fun and games seems to be centred around PvP realms these days (where the ratios are never as bad).

I think this is pretty much the key. No one recruits random players as their first choice, or just to expand a guild. EJ has always been fortunate to have both quality and quantity pretty much throughout our roster, with low attrition rates and enough people to fill the spots of those who take time off or come back. It says something that literally every single person who was with us, say, last night for our Thaddius kill, is someone I was running MC and BWL with last summer. I wonder how many guilds can say the same thing. But if both your MTs quit, or you suddenly have 10 healers turning up to every raid, finding someone who's already t2-geared and experienced suddenly seems a whole lot more important than finding the perfect fit for your guild's social climate.

Sure you have to make concessions when you're building a guild from scratch, or filling holes while making the transition from "family guild" to raiding; but the way Kasi was talking, we're considering a guild who is already of decent size but sees opportunities to absorb new people who are floating around for whatever reason.

They need to add Euro servers if they haven't done so already (haven't checked back yet). I'm on Genjuros-EU. Yes, it is a nasty imbalance -we generally don't bother with ORBs anymore since there's always 3-4 Alliance guilds at any given spawnpoint and LHC at patchday for Naxx was dreadful. Night Elves alone outnumbered the Horde there :(

*edit* wowcensus is back up and I was wrong about the Horde:
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census...servertypeid=2

Still, 800 seems to be an appropiate number for when it comes to 60's you'd actually want to recruit. As in, no Of the Eagle gear people.

See, this is why I always chuckle when people talk about alliance EZ mode being the reason they progress much faster. It has nothing to do with that, it's just there are so many more alliance guilds than horde guilds, so they have a much larger player pool to choose from.

Recruiting via server transfers.. I can't imagine how that's going to end up well most of the time. The problem is everyone sounds good on the surface, just like a resume. So many people apply to our guild, and we explicitly tell them that there are ZERO spots for BWL or Naxx.. and they go "oh no problem, I'm content with running on the 2nd team MC for now and helping them start off in BWL!" Then 2 weeks later they're bitching up a storm about how we wont fit them in for BWL, how they feel there's no room for them, etc.

I'd take it a step further from what Kaubel said. 90% are going to be assholes, 5% wont know how to play, 4% wont fit in with your guild atmosphere, and that leaves 1 out of every 100 that apply that are the real deal. Thanks, but if I want to gamble, I'll log back into PokerStars and push preflop with my 72 offsuit.

When building a guild from scratch though, yeah, you have to be more open, but you also have to be very free with the gkick. Don't let bad apples hang around for any stretch of time, or other new people (who happen to be in the magical 1%) are going to be turned off very quickly. If you don't tolerate bullshit from day 1, it won't ever become prevelant in your guild.

Let's be honest. 90% of the server population maybe. But of the people who've been even semi-vetted i.e. to eliminate the under 15s (I say 15s rather than 18s as we have a handful of 15-17yr olds who manage just fine), and the "OMGWTFPURPLEZ" crew, I'd say you'd be unlucky to find more than 50% assholes. I mean there's no point in including the people that never even stood half a chance.

On the EU servers it's probably harder to be honest, because chatting to someone it's sometimes hard to distinguish between a 12yr old posing as an adult, and a perfectly nice bloke with particularly comedic mastery of the English language.

My fault for not being more clear... I was talking about random applications, not being vetted/having references of course. It's a lot more difficult to do that for characters that are transferring to your server though.

I'm 100% positive Ruro was only referring to complete strangers. Actual friends, folks with whom guildmates are intimately familiar, are an entirely different and acceptable group of people.

One thing to note is that sometimes servers aren't capable of producing a single good cutting edge guild. Some older servers haven't had a downed Anub'Rekhan, but they might have 20 or so players on it that want to be hardcore. This is especially true for horde, so it's predicted that certain servers(Mal'Ganis being the premier one) will have horde congregate to it to fill spots / make guilds.

Another thing to note is that often you'll have people who are great players, nice, active and reliable, but because of past server drama that wasn't anyone's fault necessarily, won't be allowed to join a guild in that server. I've personally had to reject people for this reason that I thought were quality and have had to give 2 month tryouts to others just to 'make sure'. If they go to a different server with a relatively clean slate, then both them and the guild they apply to can profit.

As someone who does the recruiting for a very high-attrition guild that transfered to Mal'Ganis, I can say that I view new-transfers, transfers from our native server and native Mal'Ganis folk equal in terms of tryout(exception being the previously stated drama from our native server). We have such an extensive recruiting process that we don't really need to have a history to find quality.

Oh yeah, apparently I can't read.

Either way transfer apps must be very appealing to guilds that need geared people more than they need to their guild atmosphere intact. We have 40~ transfer apps that I know of right now, and more come every day, and we aren't even recruiting! I can't imagine how many apps DNT gets, or a big-name guild that is actually recruiting gets. The thing that sucks about transfer apps is that you are very much rolling the dice when you recruit them, because if they suck they just wasted $25 and 6 months of their time, plus there is no past history. It is pretty surprising when raid leaders and guild officers put up apps though, so much for loyalty!

What happens when 90% of your healers who have been with you since MC/BWL decide they hate healing and quit the game or roll new DPS characters?

What happens when your server has an anemic Horde population that is split between 3 "top" guilds, and there's hardly any new blood coming in through natural rerolls?

What happens when you're not the top dog guild that can skim off the cream of the crop?

Sure, most guilds would rather recruit players they know or have played with before. But if you're literally making the decision between closing up shop because you simply don't have the number of healers necessary anymore, you start to make concessions, and you've probably been making them for awhile.

Personally I'd love it if my guild had a crew of 150+ close knit friends all dedicated to raiding PVE content in the most efficient and effective way possible, but most players don't even begin to think that way.