How to Recruit, Take Two & Other Updates

I feel as though I sit here every Thursday and apologize for the fact that my Community Management module isn’t done yet, so I don’t have a sneak peek for Module 5: Expansion Planning out.

Well, this Thursday is no exception. Since online communities are sort of “my thing”, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on that module. It’s, er, kind of 30,000 words long so far. It includes actual examples of disciplinary and behavioural issues that we saw in Apotheosis in Cataclysm, as well as how we handled them, which is where the bulk of the wordcount comes from. I copy/pasted several private messages and officer communications (while maintaining anonymity). It’s all so you guys can see how we dealt with these various issues, in detail.

Right now, I’m working on the idea of cliques and how to prevent them from becoming a problem. Like I said, lots of time on this portion alone!

That said, I do have a second sneak peek for Module 2: How to Recruit out! You can find it, and all past and future Sneak Peeks, at kurn.info! I’ll still be updating you guys on the progress here, but every Thursday afternoon, until the guide launches, you’ll find a new Sneak Peek at my new site. :)

What else is going on? Oh, yeah! I was on this week’s Realm Maintenance show! I talked a bit about my guides, but mostly about Kurn’s Guild Spotlight, a short video I do every weekday where I shine the spotlight, if you will, on various guilds. I’m always taking submissions, so if you’re recruiting, plug in your guild details here for consideration for a spotlight of your very own. :)

And THEEEEEEEE Matticus sent me a whole bunch of questions about blogging, so that interview is up at his site.

So that’s what I’ve been up to! And now, back to my Community Management module and cliques…

5.4 PTR Holy Paladin Changes

Admittedly, I haven’t kept up on all kinds of patch notes in the last several months, but several of the changes noticed in the 5.4 PTR struck me as really interesting.

My instinct is to cringe and brace for impact whenever I see “Paladin” in the patch notes or the noted datamined changes. Rarely when you see a class name are they actually buffing the class. It’s usually some form of nerf.

So what are these changes that I strongly suspected would be nerfs?

1) Eternal Flame initial healing has been reduced by 30%. Boom. Nerf.

2) Sacred Shield stuff that is unlikely to actually be implemented on live. Would have been potentially interesting but probably still would feel like a nerf compared to current Sacred Shield.

3) Sanctified Wrath: Holy: now also increases the critical strike chance of Holy Shock by 20%. Buff!

4) Selfless Healer stacks now also work on Divine Light in addition to Flash of Light. Buff to this talent, no question.

5) Mastery: Illuminated Healing no longer activates from periodic healing effects. HUGE, HUGE NERF. (They’ve mentioned that this really is aimed at Eternal Flame and level 90 talents won’t be punished by this.)

6) Divine Plea no longer reduces the amount of healing done by 50%. A long-overdue change, in my opinion.

After reading the post by Rygarius in the official forums, you can better understand what on earth the devs are thinking here. What you can glean from the post is that too many Holy paladins were taking Eternal Flame, so they nerfed it (directly and then indirectly due to the fact that mastery shields will no longer proc off periodic healing effects) in the hopes of people taking some of the other talents at the level 45 mark in the tree. They admit that they don’t like the new version of Sacred Shield and that they will likely revert it. But they buffed Selfless Healer to give people what they think is a viable choice at that talent level. I’m also certain that they’ll screw more with Sacred Shield to ensure that prot paladins don’t ALL take the shield.

Blizzard has said, time and again, that if a talent is “mandatory”, the choice in the situation has been removed. As such, all three choices should be viable and should be able to be swapped around. That’s likely why Sanctified Wrath got a boost to Holy Shock’s crit, so that it would be better represented next to Holy Avenger and Divine Purpose. It seems as though Holy Avenger is getting a lot of use in fights with high-damage phases. Pop Holy Avenger, throw out a Holy Shock, gaining 3 Holy Power, then Light of Dawn, then Holy Radiance, gaining 3 HP, then Light of Dawn, etc, while Divine Purpose is better for fights without a ton of incoming damage… or for those who aren’t so good at remembering to hit a cooldown but still want a benefit. It seems that Blizzard devs felt that Sanctified Wrath could use a bit more incentive for holy paladins.

So I’m unsure that Sacred Shield will remain the way it is on live realms today. As to Eternal Flame, they said that because they’re nerfing it to no longer work with mastery, they’ll probably bump the initial healing back up, but that there are no plans to revert the change in how it works with the mastery, because it’s just too dominant for the holy population. They said, though, that if it’s needed, they’ll compensate by buffing healing elsewhere, because they think holy healing is at a good level, even with all the healing people were doing through Eternal Flame and the mastery shields it created. They’re not nerfing it because holy paladins are too good — they’re nerfing the talent to make it less attractive because there’s basically not another compelling choice for holy paladins on that tier.

I’m really glad we got a blue post about it, to be honest. It sucks to try to guess why something’s happened, so props to Blizzard for being so open about what they feel is a holy paladin problem. I strongly suspect we’ll see even more information about the level 45 talents in the coming weeks.

Introducing Kurn.info

I made a small announcement over on Twitter last night, in which I said that I’m going to be launching a new website Soon™, kurn.info.

All that’s on the website right now is basically a signup for an annoucement mailing list that’ll let you know when things change over there; when I launch the site, when my Guide to Being a Kick-Ass Guild Master is released… and when my other guides are released.

Other guides?

Yup. In addition to the Guide to Being a Kick-Ass Guild Master, I plan to write one for raid leading, one for being a role officer in a raiding guild and one for being a great raider.

All of these guides will deal primarily with logistical issues, common problems and will have very little to do with how to increase your DPS or how to defeat an encounter. These upcoming guides will largely focus on issues that have to do with raiding. (While I draw on raiding guilds as my experience for the Kick-Ass GM guide, that one isn’t restricted to raiding guild advice.)

So with all this in the pipeline (well, mostly still in my head for the other three), it only seemed logical to branch out and get my own domain that a) isn’t hard to spell and b) isn’t a subdomain of a guild that I haven’t played with in over seven months. Something to do with me seemed appropriate. When I saw that kurn.com was taken but kurn.info was available, it just made sense, you know? That’s what I’ve always done as a blogger, provided information. So it was a perfect fit!

For right now, it’ll just house the guides and such. As for the blog… Well, it wouldn’t be too hard to implement 301 redirects to the new domain, but I have a lot of work to do on the new domain and a lot of writing ahead of me, so I don’t imagine that’ll happen anytime soon. For the time being, at least, my posts will stay here. :)

So all that stuff is exciting.

I’m also excited about my Guild Spotlight project. If your guild is recruiting, fill out this form and I’ll consider doing a Guild Spotlight on your guild. Guild Spotlights are short videos showcasing your website while I talk about interesting things about your guild and your server and you can watch all of them in this one handy-dandy playlist! While I’ve only focused on US guilds so far, this is the world wide web, and it’s the World of Warcraft. I’ll spotlight guilds in other regions, too! If your guild is recruiting, don’t hesitate to let me know about it. :)

Sneak Peek 5 — Officers, Take Two

As I mentioned last week, this Community Management section of the guide is killing me. It’s huge. And it’s slow going. So no, Module 5 (expansion planning) isn’t finished yet. It’s not even quite STARTED yet. So after asking on Twitter, I settled on looking at Officers again. Last time I did that, we looked at Rebuking Officers. Today, we’re going to look at a couple of requirements I personally have for promoting officers. (The full guide has five requirements and this sneak peek gets you two of them.)

Promoting Officers
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/officers-sneakpeek2.pdf

Other topics to be covered include: the remaining requirements to be promoted, replacing officers, demoting officers and more.

If you still haven’t read my other four sneak peeks, do check them out!

Picking a Server/Faction, Setting Goals & Timetables and Schedules
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/startingaguild-sneakpeek.pdf

Building Community, In and Out of Game
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/communitymanagement-sneakpeek.pdf

Rebuking Officers
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/officers-sneakpeek.pdf

Posting your Recruitment Post
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/howtorecruit-sneakpeek.pdf

And don’t forget to tune in to YouTube every weekday for another edition of Kurn’s Guild Spotlight! Submit your guild for consideration now!

Sneak Peek 4 — Starting a Guild

It seems a little strange, I guess, to have my fourth sneak peek be from the first module of my guide, but it’s still likely more useful to you guys now than something about expansion planning (which is what Module 5 is all about). Plus, I haven’t actually, you know, written Module 5. The Community Management section I’m currently writing rivals the Recruitment section in terms of length, I swear to God. Anyhow, here’s Sneak Peek 4:

Picking a Server/Faction, Setting Goals & Timetables and Schedules
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/startingaguild-sneakpeek.pdf

Other topics to be covered include: Naming the guild, guild rules, guild structure, loot, community, fighting for your guild members and more.

If you still haven’t read my other three sneak peeks, do check them out!

Building Community, In and Out of Game
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/communitymanagement-sneakpeek.pdf

Rebuking Officers
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/officers-sneakpeek.pdf

Posting your Recruitment Post
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/howtorecruit-sneakpeek.pdf

And don’t forget to tune in to YouTube every weekday for another edition of Kurn’s Guild Spotlight!

Them New-Fangled Virtual Realm Things

Late last night, the 5.4 Public Test Realm patch notes were released. In amongst all the typical class changes was this little bit of information.

New Feature: Virtual Realms

  • Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests.
  • Players belonging to the same Virtual Realm will have a (#) symbol next to their name.

Now, admittedly, we don’t have much information about Virtual Realms at this point in time, nor do we even know if this will make it through the PTR process to make it to live. But why let a silly thing like logic stop my speculation? ;)

It seems to me, at first glance, that Blizzard has managed to come up with technology to essentially merge low-population realms without actually merging them. Merging realms would, after all, be like admitting defeat, that some realms are ridiculously unpopulated. Currently, on US realms, the most popular is Tichondrius, a PVP/PST realm with over 222,000 characters (as per realmpop.com). According to the same source, the least-populated US-based realm is Chromaggus, a PVP/CST realm with about 17,000 characters. Do you see a difference? ;)

TIME FOR MATH. (Crap.)

Assuming the numbers provided by realmpop are correct, there are approximately 17.5 million characters on 246 US-based realms. The average is, then, around 71,100 characters per realm. Now, of course, that’s just characters and not players, but you can see that if the average (the mean, of course) is around 71,100 characters, realms like poor Chromaggus are woefully underpopulated.

So why not actually merge realms? Why come up with Virtual Realms which, to quote Blizzard, “will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm”? Well, there were some problems with the idea of realm merging. Such as what? Such as names. If you’re on one realm with the name, oh, I don’t know, Kurn, but someone on another realm has the same name, which one of you is Kurn and which one of you is forced to use something like Kurnmogh? (Yes, when I first made my toon, Kurn was taken and so I became Kurnmogh.)

Guild names are similarly problematic.

Further, does merging realms actually solve any problems? Temporarily, yes, but maybe not in the long term. Say that the bottom 20 realms are merged into two realms. Apart from all that craziness going on with names and such, say you were on the server Auchindoun, which, in my example, would be merged with Blackwing Lair, Haomarush, Blood Furnace, Detheroc, Jaedenar, Dethecus, Ursin, Rivendare and Coilfang. So say you’re on Auchindoun and get merged with those other 9 servers. That’s up to 10 different Kurns or 10 different Apotheosises (Apotheoses?) that would have to be organized in terms of names alone. Then, what if this NEW merged server starts losing people? What if others go elsewhere or quit or whatever? Would THAT server be merged? If so, you’re now looking at a second merge upheaval, basically. Merging realms is just not a solid, long-term solution for low-pop servers.

Virtual Realms, however, has solved all of that problematic “upheaval” crap. No need to shut down a server when you can stick people together anyhow. And everyone can keep their own names! I could be Kurn of Eldre’Thalas and have another Kurn on Skywall and if those two realms were part of the same Virtual Realm, there’d be no conflict. Bam. There goes the biggest single headache that comes with the idea of consolidating servers. People can have the same name on the same Virtual Realm and what will distinguish them is the server they’re on and a little # symbol.

Further, Virtual Realms will mean you can join a guild on any of those servers, raid with anyone from those servers, basically do anything with that group of servers the same way you currently do server-only activities. This is kind of interesting. Multi-realm guilds? “Hey, we’re Apotheosis of Eldre’Thalas (and Skywall and Ursin and etc)…”? How’s that going to work, exactly? I’m not against this at all, just wondering how a realm-based thing like a guild is going to be accessible from other realms. Actually, in terms of recruitment, you’ll suddenly have access to something like five or ten times the population you normally do. And all those people could join your guild without paying transfer fees. Good Lord, could advertising your guild in Trade chat actually be worth it???

Virtual Realms will also mean sharing one Auction House. As someone who was quite enjoying the gold-making aspect of the game at the launch of Mists of Pandaria, that’s interesting. A more active Auction House almost certainly means the prices for everything are cheaper, because there’s more of whatever it is you’re trying to buy. For low-pop realms, this may have the repercussion that someone who makes gold reliably by farming hard-to-find materials (like past-expansion herbs and ore — Goldthorn and Fel Iron Ore, I’m looking at you!) may be out of luck because supply will rise and demand will drop. Similarly, if you have the market cornered on a certain kind of item, chances are that you will no longer be the dominant person on the AH with that item. Even if you are, you may be forced to cut your prices significantly to remain competitive.

I think Virtual Realms will be huge for improving the game experience for thousands of people out there, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions:

1) How many realms will be in a Virtual Realm?
2) With which realms will others be connected? Are they going to tack Chromaggus on to Tichondrius, for instance? Or will they do it by lumping together five to ten low-pop realms to be one large Virtual Realm?
3) Will Virtual Realms have names?
4) Will players be able to transfer to a Virtual Realm (and then get randomly dropped on a server within that VR) or will they continue to transfer to individual servers?

We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess, but this is certainly one of the more interesting things I think Blizzard has ever done.

The Flexible Raiding Conundrum

Given that I’ve been writing furiously about WoW for the last month or so, it only makes sense that I’m getting back into the swing of things in terms of keeping up with new information that’s coming out, so naturally, I have things to say about Flexible Raiding.

It was announced yesterday that Flexible Raids are being developed for the next major content update. In essence, they are bringing in a new level of raiding that fits snugly between LFR and normal raids, both in terms of people required and gear received. You can queue up for LFR solo or with 24 others or any number in between and the matchmaking system will put a full group together. Flex raids will require a minimum of 10 people (and a maximum of 25) and… will not matchmake for you. You’ll be able to walk into a raid with 10, 14, 17, 23 or 25 players or any number between 10 and 25 and the difficulty will scale.

Well, this is an interesting concept, but I have to say that my first thought was “thank God I’m no longer playing, because the idea of doing LFR, Flex Raids AND normal/heroic raiding might just kill me”. I’ll get to why that was my first thought in a minute, but let’s examine some of the other issues.

Rho and I were tweeting about this last night. In the case where, for example, on 10-man you have to kill two adds and on 25-man, you have to kill three adds, at what point does the third add show up? Wouldn’t it be smart to just have one person below that level to, as Rho put it, “game the system”? Doesn’t that go against the whole inclusionary idea behind flex raids? They clearly want you to be able to walk into raids with all the people you want to bring (up to 25 people), so say the cut-off between two or three adds is 18 people. Say you have 21 people coming in to raid and you’re having trouble making sure the third add dies. Where is the incentive NOT to drop to 17 people to overpower the two adds?

Of course, they may just remove extraneous mechanics that are difficult to scale. This isn’t normal raiding, after all. I strongly suspect we’ll see the change or removal of many normal-mode mechanics in flex raids the way we do in LFR today.

Still, the auto scaling itself is an interesting conundrum. Since there’s no matchmaking provided, you need to make sure the basic group configuration works. That means you can’t zone in with 8 DPS, 2 healers and no tanks. But can you zone in with 3 tanks, 2 healers and 12 DPS? What will the baseline numbers be for a decent ratio of tanks, healers and DPS? LFR gives you two tanks, six healers and 17 DPS. Will there be requirements in flex raids for a proper ratio of tanks to healers to DPS? I imagine that there must be, because you won’t be able to get anything done with 25 DPS. The fact that Blizzard hasn’t announced what these ratios are doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. It just wouldn’t make any logical sense. The way WoW works is based on the holy trinity of tanks + healers + DPS. I imagine we’ll see something like the following:

10-14 people: 2 tanks, 3 healers, 5-9 DPS

15-19 people: 2 tanks, 4 healers, 9-13 DPS

20-25 people: 2-3 tanks, 5-6 healers, 13-17 DPS

Unless they have technology that is going to look at the specs of people as they zone in and then tailor encounters to the group (which I think is not only doubtful, but laughably so, due to it being far too dynamic), there’s going to have to be breakpoints. And what’s sad about those ratios is that it’ll still almost certainly be only two tanks required. I’ve mentioned this before, back in 4.1 with the introduction of satchels for in-demand roles in LFG, but there is a serious issue with only needing two tanks for 10 and most of 25-man raid content and I don’t see flex raiding changing that at all.

Anyhow, group composition will likely be less flexible than what the initial post led us to believe. By not mentioning anything about group composition, without adding any caveats, one can easily assume that flex raids aren’t going to have any issues with group comp. That’s reinforced by this little line: “so you won’t need to worry about bringing the “wrong” person and having them win that piece of gear you’ve long been waiting for.” Of course, they’re talking about using the LFR loot system, not group composition here. My point is, there are going to have to be group composition-related restrictions and I’m interested to see what, exactly, they will look like.

And now, for something completely different: I actually like something about this flex raids thing.

I’ll let those of you who have fainted dead away in shock regain consciousness before I continue. You guys all right? Yeah? Okay, good. ;)

This is the part I like about the flex raids:

You’ll also be able to complete portions of your “Glory of the Orgrimmar Raider” raid meta- achievement in Flexible mode as well as in Normal or Heroic to earn cosmetic rewards such as an epic mount. This will allow Raid groups the opportunity to switch off nights between raids to complete achievements.

You know what that means? That likely means no more skipping heroic bosses for a reset or two in order to go back and do achievements for the meta. Of course, it means taking extra time outside of one’s raiding week, so you might not enjoy that terribly much, but if you want the meta achievement, you’ll do it. Further, if it’s guild-organized, you’ll probably be able to do it fairly painlessly. If I were organizing a guild through Glory of the Orgrimmar Raider (and let’s be clear — I’m not!), here’s what I would do:

1) Work through normal modes as usual, maybe snagging an achievement or two on repeat normal kills, depending on how easy they are to incorporate into the strategy we use to kill the bosses anyway.

2) Clear normal modes, start working on heroic modes. Repeat any easy-to-do achievements, but focus on getting the heroic kills. (Which are, incidentally, usually part of the meta achievement.)

3) Once all heroic bosses are down (or at the very least, all the heroic bosses required for the meta), do a weekend flex run once a week to clear out all the achievements people might be missing from those bosses until everyone in the raid group has their meta.

We took two weeks in Firelands to work on the meta and two weeks in Dragon Soul to work on the meta. While Dragon Soul was the end of the expansion and all the loot would literally be reset just a couple of months later, it might have been beneficial for us to have another two resets of heroic gear from Firelands. If flex raids continue beyond the Orgrimmar raid into the next expansion (assuming there is one, and I’m guessing there will be), this will be really helpful in allowing heroic raiders to NOT miss out on any gear due to having to do bosses on normal. Not wasting 1-2 lockouts will be great.

That said, it will also suck for lots of players, because the gear will be better than LFR and, presumably, will share tier bonuses with drops in LFR and drops in normal/heroic. That means that flex raids will have a great number of heroic raiders seeking elusive tier pieces. And since flex raids are on a separate lockout from LFR, it means that these same heroic raiders will still be doing LFR to get those tier pieces. And even some trinkets, I’m sure. Even if the item level on these are 20 levels below the normal Tier 16 gear, sometimes the bonuses make it worth it.

So you have a subsection of raiders who will likely be doing the same content three times a week: once on LFR, once on flex and once on normal/heroic.

Know what that reminds me of? Trial of the Crusader 10, Trial of the Crusader 25, Trial of the Grand Crusader 10 and Trial of the Grand Crusader 25 in Wrath of the Lich King. I joined a new guild when I had completed TOC25 and was shocked and appalled to see how many people in my new guild were doing all four lockouts every week. I was like “are you guys freaking crazy???” Luckily, we were only “required” to participate in the guild-run TOC25 and TOGC25, but I know people looked down on me for not maximizing my drops and stuff from TOC 10/TOGC 10.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who sees it this way.

I know that a big concern for raiders has been “min-maxing” their gear and, for some people, that’s their game. I wasn’t always diligent about capping VP, but I am that kind of person who capped VP on alts to buy BOE epics from the VP vendor to give to my raiding character. I would do Dragon Soul’s LFR to VP cap, although not necessarily to get my tier bonuses quickly.

In order to help prevent raider burnout, I see three solutions:

1) Don’t have LFR drop tier gear/gear that would be useful to heroic raiders. This removes the need for heroic raiders to even look at LFR, but then all the casual raiders will get pissy that they have no access to tier gear. (To which, frankly, I say that’s how it was in my day!)

2) Have LFR/flex tier work together for bonuses and have normal/heroic tier work together for bonuses, but none of the normal/heroic tier work for bonuses with LFR/flex tier. But the problem there is that all these non-organized raiders have 4pc bonuses while the heroic raiders who need those bonuses are sitting there with 1 or 3 pieces, weeping every week when their missing pieces don’t drop. (Seriously, one of our ret pallies in Apotheosis had 23 heroic Ultraxion kills and never got the heroic T13 chest.)

3) Get rid of tier bonuses altogether. I’m not a fan of this because, well, that’s kind of the point of tier, no? Even from Tier 0, the original dungeon sets, we had set bonuses. They were craptastic, mind you. (Why does a hunter need +200 armor? Really?) But they were there. All through every bit of raid content, the reward for getting your tier was the set bonuses, some of which were fantastic and some of which were awful, but many of them were at least desireable.

I also agree 100% with Anafielle that, for many people, capping VP/maxing their gear is not a “choice”. They see the obstacles Blizzard puts in front of them and feel compelled to go through it to better aid their team. I wasn’t as hardcore as she is and Apotheosis (4/13 HM) isn’t as hardcore as Something Wicked (10/13) is. The game has a huge, diverse player base, from those who don’t know how to cast a spell on someone else (no, really, people like that exist!) to people in Method, Paragon and Blood Legion. Anafielle is on the higher end, where something like new tier bonuses are going to be very desirable, in addition to VP capping. I would VP cap (reluctantly, but I would do so until I was done buying what I needed). Others don’t VP cap and still others have LFR as their only exposure to raiding. There’s a lot of disparity and with that comes a lot of lack of understanding in terms of how other people approach things. For raiders at certain levels, there’s no choice if you want to play at your highest capabilities and, honestly, these people need to know that Blizzard isn’t going to throw them under the bus by adding something that is ostensibly for non-heroic raiders, but in which a lot of value is found for heroic raiders. (Like, you know, tier bonuses on LFR and flex gear, not to mention trinkets with amazing procs and such, even if the base stats aren’t fantastic.)

Obviously, flex raiding doesn’t affect me personally at the moment, which is great, but I still find myself thinking about how I would use (or not use) flex raiding if I were still playing at my previous level. I would probably run it for achievements for the meta so as to not waste my real raid lockouts, but that’s probably it. I have my own limits and, as I learned way back during T9 of Wrath of the Lich King, doing two (or more) lockouts a week of the same content is too much for me. Doing three a week would probably offset any satisfaction I’d get from anything I’d gain by doing so, so that’s my personal limit. It’s also why I only have one realm first to my name, it’s why I’ve only ever cleared a single full, heroic tier of raid content. If you want the extras, the realm firsts, to be in the race for world firsts, you have to put in more time and more energy, and if Blizzard still doesn’t recognize that, after all this time, then raider burnout is going to hit hard during the Orgrimmar raid.

Sneak Peek 3 — Community Management

I’m still working on this module, but hey, I told you guys I’d have another sneak peek for you today, so here it is!

Building Community, In and Out of Game
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/communitymanagement-sneakpeek.pdf

Other topics to be covered include: guild community setup, setting the tone, generating discussion and, the big ones, discipline and community moderation.

If you still haven’t read my other two sneak peeks, do check them out!

Rebuking Officers
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/officers-sneakpeek.pdf

Posting your Recruitment Post
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/howtorecruit-sneakpeek.pdf

And don’t forget to tune in to YouTube every weekday for another edition of Kurn’s Guild Spotlight!

Kurn's Guild Spotlight!

While writing my guide on how to be a kick-ass guild master, I spent a lot of time writing about recruitment. I mean, a lot of time. My “How to Recruit” module of the guide is over 15,000 words long as of right now. So while writing those 15,000 words, I was consistently reminded of how much I hated recruitment and how crappy it is. And it is. It really is. It’s tireless, thankless, boring, repetitive work that needs to be done constantly and consistently.

So I thought about spotlighting a guild on a daily basis and talking about what their recruitment needs are.

Naturally, I started with my own Apotheosis. I don’t even have an active account anymore, but that guild will always be my home.

Here’s the video I made, talking a bit about what my guild spotlight is and, obviously, shining the spotlight on Apotheosis.

I plan to do this each weekday, so if your guild is in need of recruits, please post here in the comments or send me an email at kurn (at) apotheosis-now (dot) com. :) Be sure to leave me the guild name, faction, server, purpose (PVP, PVE, etc) and website. That last is super-important. :)

Hopefully, this will go a little way in helping out guild masters and recruitment officers, because it is a terrible job. Remember to thank your GM or recruitment officer (or both!) today. ;)

(PS: Don’t forget to download your Sneak Peeks 1 and 2 of my guide. Sneak Peek 3 will be coming out this Thursday!)