As promised, here are my dumb ideas and suggestions

[Hegemon]

The Hegemon's 7 easy steps to possible, maybe, I don't know guild growth and great and continuous success

Step 1: Where is Wild Harmony situated in the grand scheme of things and how people should percieve [Wild]

As much as I loathe this, the truth is that in the current state of the game, Wild Harmony is somewhat of a "noob guild". This is not to say that any of the individual members are noobs or that their skill level is not on par with other players, but as a guild we face serious competition from the well established guild/communities in regards to our recruitment drive.
For example, why would I, as a veteran of the game, want to join a guild that has nothing to offer to me except firendly conversation? This is sadly the midset of many of the people who play this game.

On the other hand, we have little Billy who just created a free to play account and is confused about the game as a whole. He doesn't know about guild perks and guild missions yet, he is scared of joining a huge 100+ member guild and he ultimatly quits the game because he is playing all alone and is still confused upon reaching level 80. This is the player we should target.

Step 2: The perfect player to target for recruitment

As stated above, I believe that our best bet for growing is to target the new and uninitiated player. Not only is this an ever growing resource nowdays since the game went free to play, but we, as veterans, have the opportunity to "grow" the new members. To teach them the game in a way to both entertain them and to benefit us in the long run. An old player set in his ways is way harder to convince to change his builds or class or whatever. Also an old player might not be interested in experiencing every facet of the game (Raids if he is a WvW player).

Step 3: Obtaining, nurturing and retaining the new recruit. Making him feel important

Man, I would've given my left nut for someone to come speak to me and invite me in a guild when I first started playing. I'm not talking about ninja inviting. What I mean is going to a starting area AS A GROUP, spotting the new players and striking up a conversation with them, get to know them before inviting them in the guild. Or perhaps doing pug dungeon runs and being friendly with the newer players trying to experience the content, teach them a thing or two, see how they react to you and then inviting them. This way, people won't be put off by being invited in a guild of complete strangers or facing the very intimidating task of applying to a huge multi-gaming community with 500+ complete strangers.

But once you got them, how do you keep them? How do you make them feel important?
When I first joined the guild, something happened that has never happened to me in an online game. Hakke asked me about myself. It is as easy as that. Every guild I was in, the process of being invited was exacly the same. I was invited and then the recruiter would say "Say hi to Hegemon", everybody would say hi and then they would completly ignore me and go back to their own conversations. This left me "drowning" in a sea of messages in the guild chat and with the burden of trying to get noticed. Needless to say, I would sit there quiet and eventually leave the guild in search of annother. Every guild advertises itself as "friendly", we could be the only true friendly guild.

Step 4: Content tackled and guild events

In my opinion, most guilds lack "content", all they do together is guild missions once a week and then it's everybody for themselves. I would like to link you guys to the website of my previous guild, which had a lot of very interesting events. The problem was that it was pretty much a zerg fest and to be honest there was a huge lack of communication and too competitive. Also, these events took place once a month. They should of been more frequent. https://www.legacyofthesix.com/events/guild-hall/ (click on the event names under history in the right hand side of the screen to view the rules and extra info about the events)

My vision is to have 2 fun random BIG events (like above) per month or maybe one big event and one RP event. We also need to run serveral smaller events for new and inexperienced members, such as story dungeons for the people who want to experience the story, or initiation sessions for people who have not experienced a particular content or other goofy stuff like that.

Step 5: True democracy vs dictatorship

This is a very important decision on the leader's end. Do you want to have the ultimate say on how the events and/or the guild is operating, or do you want to allow the members to have a say in things. But consider this, would you rather join a guild where you are nothing more but a pawn, or a guild where you have a say in things.

Step 6: To VOIP or not to VOIP

To be honest, in this issue, in am generally for voice communication. Most people are generally uncomfortable with speaking on voice comms, but speaking could not be a requirement. One thing it does do very very well is coordination during events, pvp and other competitive scenarios, including fractals and raids, which would be very difficult to achieve with text chat and this is something to keep in mind if and when we begin to grow.

Step 7: Building a community

I will be blunt about this. The forums need a huge improvement. Even though the user count is low and activity is pretty limited over there, we need to prepare for the possibilty of more people joining. As ideas go, I don't have anything interesting, however I am not above suggesting using another guild forum as a template for our own.

Thank you for taking the time to read my dumb ideas and suggestions. I welcome you guys to contribute, add or substract anything to the above, and maybe start a brainstorming session.

[Jean, the Wild Earl]

I think we should think about the AD. step 3. Several great ideas came here. Ofc I don't really feel like a person who can decide about anything, rather suggesting, since I have so little time nowadays. I don't want to put more work on Goddie and Hakke either. Recruitment went to them so I would like to read about their thoughts.

AD Step 4 - once we have some more pplz, we should take a shot with guild events. Start small, grow big. I'll take a look on your old guild when I have some time.
I have my own idea here, for continous PvP guild event, but maybe another time about this.

AD Step 5 - It's hard to giveaway the leadership. We are trully open for suggestions, at least me. It's like playing RPG games - I always liked to be the game master, but sometimes when I was looking on my players and their imagination, I wanted to take a part in campaing written by them. If you know what I mean. We will gladly enjoy your ideas, but I would like to maintain my law to "Veto".

AD Step 6 - I personally rarely have an opportunity to use TS or CurseVoice. I can't really talk when Lynx is asleep, so it's weekend for me, or when I have a 1st shift, so I'm home earlier. BUT - I can listen. We practiced it in LoL back in our days - I was listening and responding on chat when necessary. It's far more useful than no VOIP at all.

AD Step 7 - all things needs to be provided by time. This forum was made by Ann in 2-3 hours. If it's needed, we gonna even make true, regular website. But everything in it's own time.

[Hakke]

First of all, thank you Hegemon for your time and contribution into the guild, we can see your commitment and we are nothing but glad about that. Okay, straight to the point:

1) and 2) You have got a point there. Newbies to the game are the best reqruitment targets, since we might consider them an "investment" into the guild and hope they won't leave us when they'll find a guild that is considered better.

4) The main issue in here is that I'm not a creative kind of guy and it'll be hard for me to come up with a costructive idea, but I believe together we can organize something good. Yet, i still consider claiming Guild Hall as our utmost priority, since it gives us so many options with guild events.

5) As Jean already stated, we will always consider your ideas, and we will always be as objective as it is possible about them but we'd like to keep our identity.

6) I'll find ourselves a TS canal or even server if it's possible. I'll get to it at once.

7) My HTML/PHP skills aren't that great, and i can't promise that a website will look as great as your previous guild looked but when i'll find some free time and willingness I might go for it.

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