Why is the recruitment side of this game so horribly neglected?

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Originally Posted by Vidu

...yes... yes, this is clearly the problem - that someone might have to realise that the pretty girl they've been staring at isnt a girl at all...

Forgive me if I sound a bit nasty or missunderstand your intend here, but the funny thing is that (as I explained previously) I feel that the exact opposite is kinda true: "Exposing" real life females could very well lead to harrassment by people who refer to women as "gorgeous specimens"...

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To be clear, my curbing the post toward a gender-neutral term such as “specimens” was an effort to be all inclusive. I am certainly not as handsome as my avatar by any measurement. I’m male, so is he.

Also the point of letting female gamers feel safe in their avatars is just as valid a reason to steer away from voice chat as a core feature.

Finally, related to all of this, people all across the multi-axis spectrum of gender get some needed distance and escapist joy out of an MMO’s text-based delivery. Turning voice chat into a standard, an expectation harms this.

A better way to recuirt would be so welcome. Posting advertisements in shouts is annoying even if you only post like 1 every 30 minutes to and hour in each city. A recuirtment board would be awesome or a FC finder that shows recuirting FC's similar to party finder.

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Originally Posted by Omedon

To be clear, my curbing the post toward a gender-neutral term such as “specimens” was an effort to be all inclusive. I am certainly not as handsome as my avatar by any measurement. I’m male, so is he.

Also the point of letting female gamers feel safe in their avatars is just as valid a reason to steer away from voice chat as a core feature.

Finally, related to all of this, people all across the multi-axis spectrum of gender get some needed distance and escapist joy out of an MMO’s text-based delivery. Turning voice chat into a standard, an expectation harms this.

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I very much agree here. Although I Discord it up with FC mates, it's not something I'd expect to be a norm or something people come to expect in the game. Or to be expected to unmute people in a dungeon because they wanna speak.

It's already optional, you have dedicated voice services aimed at gaming that are way better than what SE could implement. Why waste the resources doing something a third party does better? And there because no standard or expectation for people to use it as a means of communication in game.

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Originally Posted by Doomguard

Having to run around each single zone with a recruitment message just addds insult to BOREDOM. g

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This is the best way to get yourself blacklisted by more people than the ones who actually join.

After being a guild leader for nearly 2 decades, the two main ways you are recruiting, /shouts and pf msgs, are by far the worst forms of recruitment for a guild. There are many ways to recruit, but one of the best ways is to be active, make people want to join. Be more active in discord servers or be helpful in game, here on the forums or other public forums like reddit. If you have enough ppl already, hold public events from lvl 1 races thru dangerous zones to content clears for new players or even roulette parties. Offer something people want, whether that is content, housing, something fun or just friendly conversation. You need to make your guild attractive and the only thing worse for recruitment than shouts and pf msgs are blind invites or walls of text.

You can use pf if you are doing something else and you just wanna have it up for giggles but it should by no means be the primary recruitment tool you are using. But if you make your guild more attractive more people will come to you wanting to join rather than having to be sought out. And it's better for member retention. Running a good guild is hard work and takes dedication, which is one of the reasons I shut mine down when I got super busy in college and couldn't spend the time with it that it needed.

Ask some leaders of successful guilds for advice, they can usually point you in a good direction to get started. No matter what kind of tools the game offers, you are the best tool you can use.

On the issue of adding voice chat to the game, I don't think it would cause any harm. There are parties who require discord to join. As always, you can find groups that respect your wishes. But having the option to have voice chat in game makes it so people who don't want to create a third party account just to chat with some strangers or don't want to join a random discord server even if they already have discord would not have to. These people can then join voice chat, even just to listen to call outs without having to speak, if the duty would be easier with it. The con might be performance issue, so if they can make an optional in-game voice chat works, they should add the feature regardless if there are third party alternatives already.

Yeah, sadly the recruitment and even the social aspect of FFXIV has never been one of it's strong points. For instance, I think the restriction of not being able to whisper someone or receive tells in a dungeon/instance should be removed. I get that the reason its there is to prevent distractions while in a group, but unless you're chilling in your housing plot/limsa all day chances are you aren't gonna be holding very many social conversations with people in game. It's one of the few archaic systems FFXIV still has in place that i think needs to be retired.

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Originally Posted by linay

On the issue of adding voice chat to the game, I don't think it would cause any harm. There are parties who require discord to join. As always, you can find groups that respect your wishes. But having the option to have voice chat in game makes it so people who don't want to create a third party account just to chat with some strangers or don't want to join a random discord server even if they already have discord would not have to. These people can then join voice chat, even just to listen to call outs without having to speak, if the duty would be easier with it. The con might be performance issue, so if they can make an optional in-game voice chat works, they should add the feature regardless if there are third party alternatives already.

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Keeping apart the very reason it will create situations uncomfortable for who doesn't want use voice, there also is another reason: adding voice require more bandwidth, more work from programmers whose job is NOT voice software, will likely results in something that can add new problems to solve, and frankly it will be unlikely the feature will work as good as other software dedicated to the scope, causing silly complains as "discord is better your voice is bad" and bla bla bla.

Let's have everyone do their job, and who wants voice already have the options to do so, inde the feature is not that badly needed. Better leave things as is, on this case.

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Originally Posted by Selova

Yeah, sadly the recruitment and even the social aspect of FFXIV has never been one of it's strong points. For instance, I think the restriction of not being able to whisper someone or receive tells in a dungeon/instance should be removed. I get that the reason its there is to prevent distractions while in a group, but unless you're chilling in your housing plot/limsa all day chances are you aren't gonna be holding very many social conversations with people in game. It's one of the few archaic systems FFXIV still has in place that i think needs to be retired.

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the reason you can't get tells in a duty is because people would start to bully others.

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Originally Posted by LalaRu

Keeping apart the very reason it will create situations uncomfortable for who doesn't want use voice, there also is another reason: adding voice require more bandwidth, more work from programmers whose job is NOT voice software, will likely results in something that can add new problems to solve, and frankly it will be unlikely the feature will work as good as other software dedicated to the scope, causing silly complains as "discord is better your voice is bad" and bla bla bla.

Let's have everyone do their job, and who wants voice already have the options to do so, inde the feature is not that badly needed. Better leave things as is, on this case.

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I agree wholeheartedly here, I wouldn't hold out hope for a quality or reliable service and IMO a waste of developer resources.

EG. When Ubisoft included it as part of The Division we ended up use Teamspeak anyway because it was better and has fewer problems. When we play ARK it's over Discord. Simply because these are dedicated services and are less likely to run into the same problems game developers might. And running a private server of ARK and turning off voice meant server resource wasn't being used up either.


I'd much rather developer resource be spent on something useful to the game than supporting a service that already freely available by third parties who are doing it better than they would.

To be honest ; thank God there aren't any voice chat in FFXIV. I don't think I would've stayed. And I'm used to MMOs, I just don't like going in a voice chat with random people that I don't know, even thought I can see why it's easier for raids or extremes.
Plus, SE couldn't control what's being said in voice chat, as far as I know, which could be a problem for reports, unless they would record every conversations— and that would be tedious.

That being said, a better function to recruit would be nice, yes. Some sort of 'board' to put and update your FC's informations, with a filter (hardcore players, casuals, raids, maps, etc).

As for the general chat, I'm not fond of it, but that's just me. I've played way too many games with world chats to know they usually aren't used for anything else but trolling, bots, or discussions between some people (that really should have been private). There were announcements here and there, some guild recruitment messages lost amidst the rest, but really, it's not that useful imo.
A tool for recruiting would be more efficient.