Pack Recruitment

I figured I should take the time to cover pack recruitment, like I've mentioned I would do once or twice in the past. If you're a pack leader right now, you probably know how tough recruitment has been lately. Heck, it's been very tough since the hack itself. Apparently we're not recovering too well.

As it is currently, there are very, very, very few people leveling. Of those, people actually gaining significant amounts of experience (read: over 1 million within a reasonable amount of time) are practically non-existent. With Sunset gone (word is that she's been IP banned now), they might be entirely non-existent. Although whether or not she was human, and thus a person, is open to debate. I'll expand on this briefly:

1: Only humans classify as people.

2: Humans are stupid.

3: Logically, anyone who is NOT stupid is therefore not human.

4: Since they are not human, they are not a person.

So, as I said, Sunset's personhood is questionable. And if that's not a word, I declare it one now.

...But that's not really the subject of this entry anyway. More of entertainment value for myself when she tries to figure out if I'm insulting her or complimenting her. Anyway...

As I was saying, recruitment is hard. This is primarily caused by several facts. I will attempt to show the relationships between them.

1: People not leveling, as I already said. This means that the three main classes of players (noobs, people who failed math class, mid levels, and high levels) are not being distributed equally. While this is normal, in that there will always be more noobs than high levels (unfortunately), currently the replacement value is almost non-existent. There are almost no players going from mid levels to high levels. Thus, there is only a certain number of high level players available for recruitment, and it is not increasing.

2: High levels are being REMOVED from the recruitment pool due to those people quitting/leaving. In addition, those players who insist on creating their own packs NOW, even though it is one of the worst times possible to create packs in the history of W-H, further remove themselves from the recruitment pool. It's even worse if they know a good number of other people on W-H and drag those members into their pack with them, draining the recruitment pool even further.

3: Players are, of course, also removed from the recruitment pool when somebody actually recruits them. Due to there not being many reasons to swap packs (more on that later), almost any player in a large pack is effectively removed from recruitment possibilities until that pack fails (if it does). Those fanatically loyal or who insist on being loners further deplete possibilities.

4: Current number of high level players up for recruitment - #2 repeating endlessly = near 0.

See the problem? This is one of the after-effects of 10x XP - it made people stop leveling. Yes, it gave us a higher number of high levels than before the hack, but that doesn't help, due to more packs around and people leaving. Not to mention the higher levels who are still freaking idiots noobs, who nobody wants.

The biggest problem with recruitment, though, is a lack of pack incentives. If you asked me, right now, why BM is better than SN in terms of gameplay, I could not give you any true answer. Let's look closer at things packs promise:

Unlimited DP/DP for gear: DP is worthless. Yes, it may be good for someone leveling... but no one is. In addition, it's incredibly easy to obtain the amounts required for gear these days anyway.

Points for leveling: No one is leveling. In addition, a lot of packs have conditions on this. Some award points for set amounts of XP. Personally, I have BM only award points per million XP past max level. Amounts also differ between packs. Either way, though, people aren't leveling, so it's not helpful.

Daily Boss Fights: I think I already made my views clear on this.

Friendly community and/or anything of that variety: While this may be true, it's typically only true for the current members - like any social group, being accepted immediately just doesn't happen. Plus, it doesn't really provide any benefit; you don't need to be in the same pack as someone to be on good terms with them. I mean, I tend to stay on good terms with most pack leaders, even if I try and steal Fang's bacon at times.

Pack roleplay: Let's face facts. If any of you are hardcore RPers like me, you will know that RP on W-H is in a sad state. I don't even bother trying. Even in a pack, it doesn't change that. W-H is not a place for serious RP. You want that, go join a Proboards forum or something. Besides, W-H doesn't even have a setting - we've never even established if we're on Earth, or whether the laws of physics even apply.

Contests: There are essentially only a few contest types:

The first is the XP contest. 99% of the time this will be won by only one person, who will be the pack's main leveler (assuming people still leveled). The only time they won't win is when they aren't able to be on. In this way, it's not even a contest - they win by default.

The second is the art contest. The majority of players on W-H are not good artists (myself included). There are, however, several exceptional artists onsite. Usually, there will be one or two of these per pack who will blow the competition away completely, again making them win by default. In addition, there's not really much of a point in doing an art contest as a pack - you'll get more (and possibly better) entries on the competition board.

The third is the 'contest for a contest idea'. Trust me, THIS NEVER WORKS. Never.

And the fourth is the random contest/raffle, where the winner is decided almost completely by chance. This is basically just a giveaway, because the pack itself isn't likely to get anything out of it. And since it's luck, there's not much you can do, aside from bribing and/or intimidating the person running the raffle to rig it for you.

In just about all of these cases, it isn't much benefit to an average player you're trying to recruit, unless they happen to be one of the best artists on site or the biggest XP whores. It doesn't actually help the player. Not a reason to join.

Aside from that, nothing else significant is usually offered. Typically there's an attempt to offer something 'unique' as well, though it's usually ultimately useless. In BM's case, this would be Aer's massmails. They offer no gameplay value, but they are amusing... to the point where several packs have tried unsuccessfully to duplicate them. Not trying to say how awesome BM is, just that nobody is quite as... 'special' as Aer when it comes to massmails. That should be ambiguous enough that I can claim it was a compliment.

So, the point is: nothing packs are offering in recruitment offers are actually even reasons worth considering. Normally, I would say that this means we need to change our recruitment offers, except that if we took all of those out, it'd probably end up as 'plz join my pack itz cool'. This is because, honestly, we don't have any good reasons for people to join us.

Some packs work through this by Bribing Their Way To Victory. Now, technically, there is nothing in the rules against bribing people to join your pack, or buying members for specified point amounts on contracts. However, there is also nothing in the rules that requires people to abide by the terms of these contracts. All in all, it's a risky situation, and it's better to avoid it. Anyway...

The logical solution here would be to lie outrageously add in actual reasons to join packs. A benefit to being a pack member, basically. For example, would it be that unreasonable to offer powerful packs a 5% XP gain boost to members? There would be many ways to do it; base a pack's 'level' on total XP, or on XP earned by members of the pack while they were members, etc. Personally, I think the best way to go about it would be to use the second method to unlock a feature, but then require packs to purchase it... for DP. Absurdly high amounts of DP.

Why? This would make DP valuable again by providing a DP sink. DP is gainable by everyone, so it's not like we'd be discriminating against those who can't donate. It'd cure our inflation issues, make PvP/Pack Wars worthwhile again, AND provide good recruitment options for packs.

Other possibilities would include a percentage increase to DP gain for members, OR automatically collecting a small amount of DP from members' kills to the pack bank. No need for donating for that. Also things like increased territory yield, although this would require territories to start giving DP again (which would then be worthwhile, since DP would no longer be worthless).

There's also the pack territory editing possibility; Karl has briefly mentioned in the past that it was under consideration to allow packs to do this (as in either changing tiles and/or adding enemies). This would allow some fluidity into what the best areas for hunting are.

Any of these things being implemented would add more reasons for people to join the better packs. At the same time, they wouldn't be an insurmountable barrier that makes it hard for newer packs - as I said, DP isn't hard to gain, and it would actually provide a benefit for people in the pack. Heck, in theory, it would be possible for a brand new pack to do better recruiting than a larger one, simply by offering more available benefits to members.

I don't really expect anything to be implemented, but hey - we can hope, right?

On an off note, I managed to cover recruitment problems, debate Sunset's humanity, demonstrate the decline of recruitable players, and suggest several different new features for packs, all in one entry. That's got to be a record.