Age of Conan

People have asked how I recruitted. I will tell you. We started small.

At first there was one of us, me. Then there were a handfull of trusted players who had access to the bank and promotions early on, though the clunky government/guild rights accesses. There were a handfull of us and I decided I'd let others run areas of the guild while I handled the a few things I was good at.

So I handled recruitting, finance, website design, and organization. When I say I recruitted about 2500 players that is give or take a few dozen. I stop counting towards the end becuase the game was hemorraging players from our server in Late Sept/ Early October. Today is it a ghosttown.

How I recruitted. Step 1 was to establish a known force in our community. Inititally we were to be known as a noob guild. To attract new players, those who would join easiest because we could offer them what they needed. A community of welcoming players, and a knowledge base as well as a collective of players who were just getting started like them.

By the time the guild began, about mid-June, the wave of first month cancellers had hit and the forums was filled with puss and vile trolling. Of course because there wasn't much good news, there was rampant patching which fixed nothing of what was really broken and those patches at the same time were introducing new bugs. At this point I really enjoyed the game and so did a lot of others but the first bite into a shit sandwhich is probably always the best.

Anway in order to compete with what we thought would be a few dozen guilds on our server, because everybody else had that, we figured we'd need about 200 core players and maybe another 200 reserves. We wanted to participate in all areas of the game and also have a large chunk of players in each 10 levels so that there was always someone of your level +/- 2-5 who could help ya out. Those were basically the limits of grouping. For about 3 months there was never a time when we had less than 20 players on 24/7. Which was great. Not everybody knew everybody else but the culture of help and support we developed was very beneficial. I spent the majority of time as leader talking with members about their ides for improving the guild and implementing their suggestions. I also had a website which had over 15,000 hits total, it was a secluded link too, never posted on the forums until September when we needed to actively recruit as a guild to the masses.

Players would tell me our guild is great, but the game is just so unfinished, its playable about why play when you've done everything, or the things you want to do, are broken, bugged, unfinished, or unobtainable. I mean of course, functional groups, RAIDs, Siege and City Construction respectively.

A few months ago that was a possibility. The peak roster size of Excelsior was 689. On that date, 74% were active within the last 3 days  The remaining 25% were active in the last 14 days. This was in July. Then the slide began. Part of our code of conduct was to dismiss those who were inactive. While other guilds would leave guys who hadn't show up in a few months on their roster we did not. I single handedly blind invited every player who was recruitted by me into Excelsior. There were others who were friends of those already in our guild. There were those who were alts from other guilds, spies, but bottom line is we were the most populus and active guild for many months. Over the course of Excelsior I accounted for over 2365 characters recruitted. With Excelsior Elite, our sister guild on another more populated server we had up to 100 before the unfortunate events.

During this time we held a bunch of events for our guild and we would regularly peak with over 50 members online at any time on the weekend. There were days in September when the server population wouldn't even peak at 50 during the weekend. That is when you know the good days are over.

We didn't make it as far as I wanted, part of the problem was other guilds specializing in one particular area were able to recruit within our ranks, and also the persona I portrayed, the pompass annoying jerk face who would defy any who slighted our guild got old for others. It is a role playing game however folks, I'm sorry that playing a role, is just not understood by the masses, and that even though my character was annoying, pompass, you could choose an equally annoying approach.

Our guild was able to maintain a large base because of the many things we did to inspire cooperation and achievement. We didn't fail funcom, Funcom failed us. As it became clear, both seemingly and then measurably spartan in terms of Massively multiplayer interaction, I decided I wanted to offer everybody the chance to check out another server as a guild, and succeed there togther. However one unscruplous member from the prevous server, followed us, infiltrated and disbanded our guild on that server. When the GM told me they knew who it was to leave last, and that everybody left in a few seconds, wether by kick, or voluntarily, of course I knew they were kicked. They did nothing. No ban, no punishment, nothing.

I knew then it was time to quit. There is no point in playing a game and making any investment, which you have to do in an MMO in order to get your money's worth from the complexity of it, if the company which develps it isn't going to deliver what they promised in terms of features and content, and secure guilds from destruction in non-official ways. They also lost about 100 gold worth of items and resources of ours, told us they were retrievable, and then 3 weeks later after trying to get it reconsiled, we find out they have no evidence it even ever existed and they offered 200 granite best offer to settle.

No thanks Funcom. They way you handled situations over and over, the lack of progress on major, critical,  and missing issues. I didn't expect you to deliver the world, simply what you said you were going to deliver, in a timely manner, and some features and protections you would think are basic necessities. PVP system, Guild Management Rights.

But I guess not.

The most important thing we did, was listen to our guildmates, via discussions, surveys, come up with group activities, even though this is a solo RPG for the most part, and we tried to offer the best guild for players of any level range to be in. The only 2 level ranges we didn't succeed in doing that in were the 70s and 80s and that was more a failure of server populations. There simply were only ever about 100 level 80s total on our server, and the majority of them were from hardcore players, who rushed to 80 or just played their one or two mains until they hit 80. Usually the peak number of 80s online was always under 12 on Haunman. Pathetic I know, but basically it limited the number we could recruit. Players wanted Siege and Raids and it just can't be done when there are only 2 guilds doing Raids and nobody doing Siege. Nevermind that both were bugged. So thats the story.

Whats more shocking than Funcom doing nothing to assist your guild after that moron kicked/disbanded you, the fact that this has happened before and they gave that guild 550,000 resources with which to construct a T3 city/battlekeep. The guild in question lost I think 134k in resources and was effectively rewarded with a full t3 city. This kind of all over the board responses to identical issues is more boggling than anything.

I've read this whole rant, plus your last whole rant and even the whole rant posted in your profile.

I still agree with everything you have said about AoC and the problems with MMOs in general (the point you made about people being too forgiving of MMOs being broken at launch is my personal favorite).

I also feel for you in terms of how AoC killed your guild that you put a lot of time and effort into. I had the exact same experience with Shadowbane so I know how much that sucks.

But there is still something funky about this. Your 2500 number is somewhat more believeable if you say that was the total number of people you invited over the course of time, not the number of people you had all at one time. But I did a google search trying to find your website and not only did I not find it but instead I found posts on the AoC official forums. Are you the real CobraSolidus? Sometimes the Cobra from the official forums posts messages caliming to be from you, other times he posts messages that look like they are directed at you. And in the midst of it all you seem to get flamed by everyone. It sounds like you spent most of your time in-game sending blind invites to noobs and cussing out other guild leaders.

The fact that you admit in this rant that you ropleplayed a "pompus annoying jerk face" tells me that assement probably isn't far off course. I'm going to tell you right now, I've never accepted "roleplaying" as a valid excuse to behave like an ass. I saw too much of that crap in Shadowbane from the elven players who thought it was okay to flame and troll the forums because it was what real elves would have done. Thats crap. You act like an ass expect to be treated like an ass. And I think its safe to say thats why you keep getting banned from this forum...

Look, this forum is a waste of your time. You obviously only want to flame the AoC fanboys here, and I can't blame you for that. But the sad fact is that right now an AoC fanboy is in charge of this forum and posts he doesn't agree with either get locked, flamed or simply mysteriously disappear. Even if you tone down the flames in your posts and cut back on the profanity, you will still get shot down every time so if I were you I would just move on. Put your guild website back online, write up a history for your guild telling everyone about how AoC screwed you and let nature take its course. Its pretty much all that can be done at this point. Trust me, I've been where you are now.

It was pointed out in the AoC forum that you made everyone in the guild of 100 high enough officers that each and every one had the power to kick anyone from your guild.  And you were suprised at what happened ? 

It seems like you're in love with consonants.

I remember this on the AoC boards and FC is not to blame. Sorry but you are retarded for making everyone in the guild have access to the guild bank and have power to invite and kick at will. This is what happens. You asked for it, and the guy probably did it because you were being a douche.

A guild that shall not be named caused an entire guild, like yours, to fall apart due to the same type of thing fo [b]Fun[/b] and the guild feel apart. Funny thing is they were going to be a good guild. Taking out the competition ftw.