Hi everyone, 

A little background, I am a pretty normal officer in a pretty normal guild. One of the things I try to do is recruit people to join us - you know, some players quit, take breaks, move on up to cooler guilds - we gotta keep recruiting. Bringing in more players is important. 

Currently, guild recruitment is a wild west, and it feels more difficult than it maybe has to be. Right now, new members enter a guild these main ways:

- promote guild on server chat, hope someone sees and whispers you - works even better if you have Olvia/Seasonal server access
- put guild ad in a discord channel or forum, hope someone sees the ad and reaches out to you

- register guild introduction on the recruit list, periodically, hope someone scrolls thru and likes yours and whispers you

- check your guild recruitment tab, see applicants, whisper them and hope they aren't AFK so they respond

- directly ask every unguilded player you interact with if they want a guild

- be a high-ranked guild frequently holding territory, so pvp-minded players will naturally approach you to join in your wins

We make it work but I think it could be easier for all parties involved. 

I'd really like to see some software development time put into some enhanced interfaces to help get players together into guilds. I'm not sure if I really have a bunch of brilliant ideas or possible solutions ready, but I do see it as a concern worth brainstorming. I think *most* new players and even already-active players do better and play more when they are in an active guild that they enjoy the community of. So improving the process to find a good-fit guild for you would be beneficial. 

- Guild ranking system improvement: show a stat of "Node Wars Won, Node Wars Entered (Guild Lifetime Total)" and also "Node Wars Won, Node Wars Entered (Rolling 30-day total)." This way, a player totally new to node wars could easily identify "oh hey these are the actually active node war guilds, and these guys actually occasionally win some." Veteran players already know who the main guilds are in the NW scenes, but these stats would be useful to newer people not sure which guilds they'd like to try to join. For the record, my own guild would have HORRIBLE numbers in this statistic, but I still think it would be really cool to track and sort guilds with this information. 

- Guild tags & requirements, and guild searches that are based on those tags & requirements improvement:  I'd like to be able to fill out an ingame form of checkboxes for my guild to say, "we do X, Y and Z. We require new members to do A, B, and C." Then, there would be an interface that anyone could use to search for guilds based on those same attributes - as well as stats like in the bulletpoint above. Like, anyone could use a guild search window to say, "show me all guilds that require no more than 600GS, that claim to do Khan every week, that have won at least 1 node war in the last month." And then they get a list of results that are very meaningful to them, that will actually help them pick a guild to try to apply to. 

- a guild attribute/setting of "we'll take anyone" - this is a crazy idea here, listen: what if the GM could set a tag for their guild, that they are truly open to anyone, no requirements at all - and when this setting is turned on for the guild, every new player could just have the option to click a button "I feel lucky, auto-join any guild that'll take me" and then automatically be dumped into a guild that has this tag activated without being picky. maybe there's a requirement for the guild to complete 80% of their weekly missions and pay decent salaries to keep this setting turned on, or there'd need to be some system of identifying guilds as "mentor newb-friendly" guilds to be allowed to activate a setting like this, but the advantage here would be that new-player-friendly PvX zerg guilds wouldnt even need to advertise their guilds manually anymore, they could just have new players automatically filter in. With big PvX guilds recruiting by an automatic method like this, there'd be less recruitment noise in server/world chat and fewer incentives for officers/GMs to hang out on Olvia & Seasonal servers advertising their guilds.  

I dunno, those are just some ideas. I don't think I have the best answers, but like I said earlier, I really think the guild advertising & recruiting & joining process could be better than it is now, somehow.