#guild-recruitment-centre: Overall concerns.

[sonic burrow]

As proclaimed in server news, I am posting here due to the adjustments made to the previous channel dedicated for (primarily) guild advertising. With there now being an one post per guild ruling within a forum setting, it is difficult not to foresee a vast amount of unsavory side-effects affecting mostly communities which wish to attain a more engaging guild emphasizing socializing. To not make this overly convoluted, I will break my concerns down:

1. Accessibility: previously, users could simply go to the channel and after scrolling for a minute or two you'd have a relatively clear picture in regards which guilds & communities are active. Now, forum filter tools and navigating through the forum will become the new norm, which will in all likeliness deter people from utilizing the advertisement platform to begin with.

2. Relevancy: determining which community is- and is not active now has become more difficult to discern. After some months let alone years, any place active will be borderline impossible to find unless you go through extensive trial and error whilst digging through posts corresponding to your in-game server(s). This hits guilds which are not entirely public via external locations e.g. disboard especially hard but ultimately puts everyone running active guilds at a disadvantage.

3. Advertisement: as in, the actual ad containing information, flashy banners et cetera. After sufficient time has passed, this is now going to be visibly gone unless re-posted periodically within the same post. It is bound to become a clustered and messy experience.

4. Spam: in order to offset the posts being buried and falling into obscurity, bumping a post via direct means or indirect means is likely going to be the norm. This may contain the encouragement of one's guild members to post within the recruitment post, frequent edits, utilizing and pushing the post intentionally for any question & answer matters and so on and so forth. Or directly bumping the post. Overall, rules in place here hold the potential to birth a lot of petty type of behavior just to avoid the ad from being practically gone from the majority's vision.

There previously was a case of several people spamming ads to attract more people, something I engaged in as well to avoid getting outspammed which is why the 'one ad per community' ruling always seems the most logical; I am unsure why this never was implemented. Whether it involves multiple people posting an ad, splitting the ad in segments or creating mini communities all leading to one main server, if the channel no longer is a wildwest of non-existing play it by ear rulesets and moderation ensures the rules are linear and well-defined, this could be easily remedied. Simply an 'every community is entitled to one advertisement every x amount of hours' would be more than sufficient, warning offenders of this rule equally and fairly.

Finally, the spambots. There are a plethora of solutions for this problem and it genuinely surprises me those have never been invested into. A toggleable role allowing people to advertise or having it be a 'granted upon request' would effectively terminate the ability for all the shady NSFW bots to post. Alternatively, apply a bot like YAGPDB.xyz which allows custom lists to be made and add the few discord invite links leading to malicious servers in there so their posts are auto-deleted and the user auto-banned. Those users with compromised account still exist and are within the server, if there are scammers, would it not be more ideal to secure the safety of users and invest into methods ensuring they are gone?

Overall, it is just difficult to see the forum as a proper and helpful tool for guild advertising.

[violet tangle]

1. Scrolling through walls upon walls of text, half of which are just same guilds repeating same ads is not "giving clearer picture". Using filters will make finding actually relevant guilds easier.
2. Adjacent to 1 - while it is true, it also essentially made any guild not willing to endlessly spam their posts essentially non-existent. It will increase chance of finding a guild that's no longer active, or currently full that didn't care enough to update their tags, but it'll also make finding any other guild significantly easier. Overall we considered this might be an issue, but not a significant enough.
3. I don't understand what you mean by that, sorry.
4. Not only is that not an issue - it's one of the main reason we made this change. Guilds competing for "space", bumping and spamming their ads was the source of way more drama than it has any right to be. This change will make it much harder to "game" the system, easier to spot it and we WILL actively and severely punish attempts to do it.

At the end of the day it's more important to create an environment in which it's easy for users to find a guild for themselves, while ability of guilds to advertise is merely a logical side effect, and that's what these changes mostly trying to address.

[sonic burrow]

1. This implies that people are going to effectively deploy filters to find matching guilds, which is just unlikely to happen. Forums do not attract the same traction as a channel does, due to it being vastly less accessible and plainly put less easy.
2. In practice this change is more likely going to hinder servers from growing, especially the smaller or newer ones, largely due to again, forums attracting a lot less traction. I personally do feel that a server essentially not being able to attract new folks anymore due to being buried under eventually heaps of (often dead server) ads is a pretty significant concern...
3. I meant that the first message in a post which contains the guild ad is going to be eventually drown out by potential messages from people e.g. queries regarding open slots.
4. There isn't a lot I can reply here, since I can only guess what said drama contains. But, emphasizing expressed points prior, wouldn't a case of 'only one ad per community' effectively end such concerns? I would assume that was the primary problem expressed.

Overall it seems a tad-bit unreasonable to have active servers be entirely buried underneath by ultimately inactive ones, in the long-term user experience would be worse, as servers which are alive and kicking are practically no longer visibly present. Servers which depended on the channel are likely going to perish lest they can self-sustain via users joining in-game.

[random canopy]

Personally, I think a large billboard on the road grabs a reader's attention more than seeing the same boring repetitive advertisement every 500 meters during your travels on the road. Same logic applies here

Best case scenario, the player will use the Tag feature and then find a relevant guild to join. Worst case scenario, they may have to scroll for a while to find a guild of interest.

Ultimately, I think this is a better solution to the problems that plagued the old friend-and-guild-id channel. And if there were issues, it'd be easier to police in its place. Convenience-wise, this is also a big win as well as the management won't have to backread a portion of a channel filled with text and embeds. Just a single check on a post with minimal scrolling and sorting out problems.

Best to say that you guild advertisers better be on their best behavior when it comes to guild ad posting and promotion in one way or another. Speaking as someone who used to advertise

[sonic burrow]

The contrast between a large billboard and a forum is somewhat extreme, considering the sheer amount of advertisements which will be effectively buried and practically invisible. Servers which do not advertise via exterior means or are exclusively AL-bound will greatly suffer. The only thing I can truly agree with is it being more convenient for management, granted simply enforcing the six hour timer for all communities does not seem like it is that much an ordeal.

At the end of the day, this is just going to harm active communities. If a guild is not willing to advertise their server now and then (whether that is a 6 hour timer, 12 hour, 24 etc...) why proceed to punish those which do? It seems off to have a dead server post be given the exact same attention as they pile up and drown out active communities from existence. This is not so much providing an equal playing field as it is bulldozing it all together and harming smaller servers in that process.

[fathom radish]

the issue with inactive guilds might be solvable with nimi purging said forum completely every half year, tho i don't know if that's doable or even needed.
just throwing the idea out there

[latent folio]

Pinging/Informing us of inactive guilds who aren't running anymore will help in managing the system, since this is now much more easier to manage and sort through.
Just my own two cents, I don't see much issue with this system considering it now lets smaller communities have a better chance in life in growing and nurturing a community
In the old guild system, it mostly only benefitted the bigger and more active communities as they have the manpower to constantly and consistently advertise their community meanwhile smaller communities aren't able to stand a chance because they are constantly drowned out, and not a lot of people are exactly attracted to the fact they have to scroll through hundreds of walls of text to find a guild that catches their eye while also fitting their requirements.

[sonic burrow]

In terms of theory-crafting, the benefits are relatively obvious. But in practice, very few will bother with filters and the only guilds which will receive any real attention are the last few posted since most will not bother scrolling beyond that. New communities are henceforth crippled in their ability to grow, since they require more than a few weeks at most of visibility to stand much a chance in terms of growing.

Ultimately, it is just not viable to be entirely dependent on ALO for sustaining a community by itself anymore, with this change it would force exterior locations to be utilized.

[violet tangle]

What you're describing are minor issues, which are while not wrong, also absolutely present in non-forum channel and would be even worse there.
As well as a lot of assumptions that I just simply disagree.

1. It is true that some people will not use filters and might get confused. It is also true that in normal channel using filters isn't even an option for those who WILl use them.
2. What you're saying is your assumption that I don't agree with. Inactive servers will not be an issue for a very long time and we will figure out ways to handle this issue when it'll become one if it'll become one.
3. If you never opened a topic, the first time you do, it'll start from the top. Also if you clicked on a topic of a guild recruitment, it's safe to assume you did this because you got interested in the guild and will have no issue in scrolling to actually see it. Also also I cannot imagine each specific guild recruitment post getting so many messages it'll bury the initial post.

[sonic burrow]

The biggest disagreement likely would be the notion of how crucial ALO is for guild-only servers and the willingness to disregard their ability to self-sustain as a minor issue (or issues which would lead or are attached to that), which seems unreasonable. What I do agree with is that it will take some time before inactive servers become an issue, but it is going to become a prominent problem when small communities will find that no one will touch their servers any longer due to a certain amount of scrolling now being mandatory for any form of discovery. Everything said at point three seems either reasonable or factual so I have little to add there.

[violet tangle]

I already addressed the issue with small communities in my initial response - while it's true that older post will get burried, they will get burried way less than in the old system where you need either to dedicate a lot of effort spamming the channel to ALWAYS stay on top, or straight up Not Exist, if your recruit message is older than 2 days. It creates a very unhealthy competition between guilds and communities where they all just thrown into one pile and a user who's looking for a guild is just more likely to not bother and just go with the latest post. Now guilds will only 'compete' with guilds that the player chose filters for and players are more likely to actually be 'choosy' and scroll through the list, when that list is short and concise and give more of a chance for older posts.
It makes it somewhat harder for communities that are willing to put the effort into constant posting and re-posting to stay on top, but MUCH easier for smaller ones who do not or cannot. It makes things fairer and 'levels the playing field' so to say.
This is good from our perspective.

[sonic burrow]

What I understand entirely is wishing to reduce the amount of ads / curb their frequency to lessen the need to essentially have people in multiple time zones hawk over the channel and post as soon as possible. But a forum just seems like an odd pick, although points there would likely just ping pong.

What I don't understand is why taking the same or similar approaches to servers with similar issues is somehow not viable. Having a bot enforce a more strict timer would make it so more ads get more visibility and do not get buried, whether that involves a 24 hour cooldown, 48 or an entire week. This would remedy the issue of 'ads getting buried by dead / inactive servers' or just getting buried in general.

[violet tangle]

mostly because these solutions were not presented to us
it's true that some another solution might've solved some issues, but this one also solves them and is the one we ended up coming up with and implementing

[sonic burrow]

If alternative methods are presented and are deemed preferable, would they be investigated and looked into?

[violet tangle]

absolutely, but I'm not promising we will end up implementing them
but we will look into them and consider them, yes

right now we want to see how current system works out and what issues pop up in practice
if we see there are issues with it, we might go for other solutions

[sonic burrow]

I understand, thank you for taking the time to address points above. Would it be more ideal for me to contact you in DMs in terms of proposing solutions / technicalities accompanying such e.g. bot solutions enforcing a certain timer or is it preferable I just voice everything further here?

[violet tangle]

whatever you prefer

[jade peak]

The contrast between a billboard advertisement vs a forum advertisement is exactly alike, and the comment stating this is entirely correct;

A well designed advertisement catches your attention once and immediately has you interested in the good being offered; multiple smaller less well designed adverts are obnoxious and ignorable and waste the consumer's time.

There is no reason guild recruiters for a gacha game cannot do simple business things and just create one GOOD advertisement

[sly anvil]

This new system is already burying smaller communities and by far puts any budding community, especially ones based only in the lil enterprise server with a small base of people, at a HUGE disadvantage in terms of gaining new members and growing their community. The revenue of members is going to drop to practically nothing, rendering most smaller communities advertisements here entirely useless and unfairly buried under a forum system. Its already happening and will grow worse as more people post their ads. Majorly unleveled playing field that seems driven on killing small Azur Lane communities

[sly anvil]

Im sorry but what they mentioned are not "minor issues" they are big flaws with the system

To see moderation call that "minor issues" makes me feel like the complaints and points being made are being brushed out a window

[jade peak]

There's no reason guild recruiters can't make one good advertisement

Similarly, there's no reason large sized guilds also cannot reduce their membership requirements to be more accessible to general publics, but alas it's Gacha FOMO #19374847472901 and so no such thing will ever happen because gacha players are pissbabies when they can't get their special rewards for being overachievers

Realistically speaking any issues caused by low player recruitment and massive disparities between guild sizes is an issue created solely by the players; this server is just trying to make that disparity less of an issue from what I can see by preventing large guilds from burying smaller ones in spam with low quality adverts

[sonic burrow]

It matters little how well a guild advertisement is constructed if they eventually are drowned out into obscurity due to spam. This is what the forum and the past channel have in common, hence I do not think anyone disagrees that solutions were preferable. When I posted ads by myself I found this to be a rather frustrating experience because servers with multiple people advertising had a ball drowning those out with what felt to be the equivalent of a full-fledged marketing team, I had to ask for help from those with different time-zones. And I believe this is a problem many people experience, because how can you nurture a community if only those willing to to invest a rather obsessive amount of consecutive effort can participate? The whole process is essentially vastly more infuriating than it has any right to be.

The disagreement is more bound on the approach, I think we can all agree that how the previous channel operated was hectic. (Mostly) everyone is on the same page there. I myself own a relatively small community, but I find this to less likely resolve the problem which is reaching out to the largest audience plausible within the current setting. In theory, I should now have a massive edge over the other much larger servers because of the filter system. Even if a ton of people are going to post ads with the same server tags, the time it will take for this to bury others out takes a while. If smaller servers now experience more growth, that would be a win and everyone is happy; larger communities have an easier time coming by with mouth to mouth advertising, inviting friends and so on and so forth. So they also should not suffer all that greatly, or so I would imagine. But, forums are not a very accessible format in contrast to channels, as I tried to emphasize prior.

What in all likeliness is going to happen is advertisements are going to be buried, some people will deliberately wait to post their ad to optimize their uptime. There will likely be some cases of delete and re-posts but that would probably be a warning, so never mind that. Smaller servers now will gain less people since they are now harder to find even if they have someone actively trying to recruit. And if during the time a community gains practically no people even when they are high up there in their corresponding in-game server, I would argue that this further illustrates how this is going to harm smaller communities rather than help them, but that would be a case of 'time will tell'.

[jade peak]

I will point out, on off case of deleting and reposting, if it's done on the server, a 48hr slowmode or however long the maximum is is more than enough