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

No voice server for the game

No free company recruitment system ingame

No general chat channel

It's very hard work to recruit players in this game. Yes, I can understand the lack of a general chat channel, (I turned off the mentor channel due to the vileness of the chat) but having to use outside forums and outside voice servers just points at a lack of concern for the social side of the game

Having to run around each single zone with a recruitment message just addds insult to BOREDOM. Standing around with a party finder message for several hours isn't anyone's idea of fun.

People are reduced to standing around like puddings using Party finder to recruit for statics raid groups or free companies because there is no real ingame alternative to using Party finder as a glorified message board.

Your systems are either flawed or brilliant if peeps don't use them for their intended purposes: - in this case it's flawed

Why isn't there at least a simple free company recruitment page allowing peeps to browse recruiting and active free companies? Even some 2nd rate MMOs I could mention can manage that!

FF14 is an mmo with the social aspect not being treated with the proper respect. A great game, full of people, but without the tools to make it easier to build proper communities to enjoy the game as fully as it deserves

It's frustrating. Worse, it's getting stale, old and boring

1) No voice server: Yoshi has adressed this by saying that he doesnt want to add voice servers because people could feel preasured to engage in voice chat even if they dont want to (aka: people making it a hard requirement to join certain parties because "Its part of the game now we can enforce everyone using it"). With programs like Discord around we also have far better voice chat easly available for free than SE could probably provide anyways. Any harassement that would happen in their ingame voice chat would also be much harder to track than written chats. Personally I agree with their stance here - there are super easy ways to use a voice chat for this game.

2) Agreed, better recruitment for FCs would be nice - I've been hoping for a "market board for FCs" for a while now...

3) At least for new people there would be the novice network (if they get an invite) - personally I never understood the appeal of a general, wordlwide chat... shout-chat is already always an annoying mess that I rather keep turned off...

A useful recruitment tool would be nice.
Fellowships are so close to being useful but they clearly weren't created with that in mind.

I think if they included better searching/tagging and could be linked directly to FCs and CWLs they could be a powerful and user-friendly recruitment tool, but right now recruiting with fellowships is like eating a salad with a spoon - it's possible sure but it's pretty frustrating and not very inefficient. A fork would be nice.

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Originally Posted by Doomguard

Having to run around each single zone with a recruitment message just addds insult to BOREDOM. Standing around with a party finder message for several hours isn't anyone's idea of fun.

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While I agree the game should have tools specifically for recruitment I can tell you that many still would be going around shouting about it in various zones, posting in the forums or using pf to advertise. The fact is that anyone who is trying very hard to recruit will use anything they can to get their message to as many people as possible. Furthermore people looking for raiders know that using pf to advertise is a good way to get the attention of that sort of player.

Also my time in other mmos taught me that not everyone bothers to use in-game tools to find a fc/guild/static. Sometimes people don't even think they want to be in a community until they see a shout that intrigues them. And of course you have new players who may be unaware that such a tool even exists.

However actual recruitment tools would be handy for those who do not feel like teleporting all over the place and so on, and it allows them to continue to advertise in-game without being logged in.

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Originally Posted by Doomguard

No voice server for the game

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Not even sure if such a thing is possible in the game. SE regularly cite server limitations for not bringing in a variety of features. That said I think it would be good to have one. Most people do use discord but for ps4 players it's not exactly ideal because they need to use their phone or a laptop for that.

But I think even if SE introduce their own voice chat most players will end up using discord anyway because it's excellent for being able to create a variety of voice and text chat channels, and even have access to those based on rank. In-game voice chat tools tend to be very basic, and I don't see SE creating one as advanced as discord.

Maybe if and when FFXIV comes to the x-box we'll get an in-game voice chat because then the potential amount of console players would rise, so the need for one would increase.

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Originally Posted by Vidu

1) No voice server: Yoshi has adressed this by saying that he doesnt want to add voice servers because people could feel preasured to engage in voice chat even if they dont want to (aka: people making it a hard requirement to join certain parties because "Its part of the game now we can enforce everyone using it").

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I wasn't aware of this but I can understand Yoshida's stance on it. A lot of people aren't comfortable using voice chat for a variety of reasons, and some may not even be able to speak on it themselves due to their living situation (sharing a room with someone, for example).

I left Novice Network after about a week on joining the game due to all the "humour" which was too vile to bother with

So I do get why no general chat channel, but my point is the lack of it makes some issues far harder like recruitment than they should be, and there's no proper mechanism to compensate for it's loss, like a "Market board for FCs"

I think the arguements against Voice capability ingame are flawed and more to do with money than anything else, but as you say, there are decent alternatives out there

Recruitment is a big miss for most MMO's in general.

14 though, ends up being the most anti-social MMO I've ever played most of the time, because its interface issues with instances and communication windows, instances and tells, and instances and basically everything, lack of zone and server-wide native channels and disasterous implementation of fellowships (which I regularly forget even exist because I cant send their messages to a text box, or display them somewhere permanently in my UI) end up creating a world that is incredibly silent and filled with walled-off bubbles of chatter.

It often feels like the design of the game and the implementation of the design are two completely different games.

In-game voice, though, is usually awful and causes more performance issues than it solves.

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Originally Posted by Doomguard

I left Novice Network after about a week on joining the game due to all the "humour" which was too vile to bother with

So I do get why no general chat channel, but my point is the lack of it makes some issues far harder like recruitment than they should be, and there's no proper mechanism to compensate for it's loss, like a "Market board for FCs"

I think the arguements against Voice capability ingame are flawed and more to do with money than anything else, but as you say, there are decent alternatives out there

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In regards to voice chat: I dont think you realise how offputting that can be for people who arent used to MMOs and voice chats being used - so basically people who arent only new to this game but to online gaming in general. Seeing how FFXIV is part of the Final Fantasy, a series mainly consisting of solo-games, you have quite a few people here who arent experience with MMOs. Myself included - I started playing this game because of my intrest in Final Fantasy, not because I was intrested in playing an MMO. The idea of having to use a voice chat to talk to strangers in a foreign language (english isnt my native language) used to make me extremly nervous - the outlook of only being able to play this game when using voice chat would have certainly not appealed to me. And yes, I know, one could still choose not to join a voice chat, but having a lower barrier can lead to one feeling forced to join a lot easier.
Another thing to consider and not treat lightly is harrassement, pure and simple - because it would be more difficult to track (unless they record all voice chats?). On top of that, while we have a large female population and a more or less nice community you'd have to deal with this whole area aswell: Females who might not be that comfortable revealing that they are infact female. I played a male character for two years because I'm not that fond of getting hit on (which is something that does happen.)

Again, with Discord easly available, I dare say that the cons outway the pros by a lot.

As my FC's/static's appointed recruiter, I certainly wouldn't mind more in-game tools for recruitment. I can understand why voice chat would be off the table in-game, and at least personally I'm fine with that. I feel like they were vaguely trying to do something along this vein with the fellowships, but the implementation for those is far from ideal for recruitment. Nevermind how tedious and inefficient trying to use the PF for recruitment is. Sure, you can try going to populated areas and shouting your recruitment details, but you're liable to get drowned out by bot advertisements and other general shenanigans happening in these areas, assuming there's anyone who doesn't basically treat recruitment shouts as spam in the chat anyway.

If we had specific boards (as others have brought up) designed to handle more long-term recruitment posts for both FCs and raid statics, and allowed interested players to reply to these with info about themselves as well as let them ask any questions they have, I feel it would go a long way towards making things less stressful. I'm sure it may take work to implement something like this, but at the same I think most of what would be required is already part of the game. I believe it would just be a matter of putting these tools together in an efficient and user-friendly way. Of course, there will always be Discord servers and other social media that can be used as recruitment tools, and I certainly have no problem with making use of those platforms, but it really would allow for more visibility to create proper in-game tools to work in conjunction with these.

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Originally Posted by Doomguard

People are reduced to standing around like puddings using Party finder to recruit for statics raid groups or free companies because there is no real ingame alternative to using Party finder as a glorified message board.

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People using a tool called Party Finder to...find a party? I don't see a problem there.

Now, they just need to add an FC-finder and an LS-finder and add more feature to Fellowship-finder.

I was in wow when they first added voice chat. Enough people didn't want to use it that the best way to converse was to just use text anyways because otherwise half the party would be out of the loop. For harder content we had things like ventrilo, and these days I guess discord.

Maybe useful for console players? Dunno. Voice+MMO for the general population has always been a hard sell. I would most assuredly opt out of it if it were to become a feature, though. I've been down that road and... no thanks.

Voice chats in MMOs are...honestly a waste of time for them to develop, and usually not that great in terms of quality. Most people will just opt to use third-party voice chat programs like Discord nowadays anyway, which are much more reliable.

I would LOVE it if they added some kind of effective Free Company recruitment to the game that doesn't force people to rely on means outside the game to find people interested, or require members to stand around using shout chat in cities.

I do agree that having a generalized chat wouldn't be a bad idea. As annoying as people can be in them sometimes, they can actually be pretty good networking channels to get various things done. Currently, I know my server uses Novice Network in this fashion, as a general socialization channel (in addition to giving new players advice), and for the most part, it's not too bad.

ask someone in your fc who actually does content which does not require duty finder to use party finder.

They can add all of that and it wont fix the communication problem in the game.

Yesterday I went 5 hours having only said one word..

I haven't played a MMO yet that had a truly effective FC/guild/clan/club recruitment system. Listings became cluttered with inactive groups that claimed to be always online doing all content so players looking had a difficult time finding an active group that matched what they were looking for. Recruitment has generally come down to inviting friends you made doing content together or public chat spam.

I would still love to see an effective recruitment tool that had listings expire on the final day of the month. Officers of FC that are actively recruiting could one-button relist using the previous listing or make adjustments before doing it.

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Originally Posted by Rasikko

They can add all of that and it wont fix the communication problem in the game.

Yesterday I went 5 hours having only said one word..

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That doesn't sound like a communication problem. That sounds more like lacking any reason to chat.

Between linkshells and FC (and Novice Network on an alt), there's usually someone looking to chat except in the very early morning hours when few are online.

Sorta "FC search" in game will be nice.

Maybe listing FCs with filters as
- current number of logged in members (to avoid FC maybe active but not much in your playing time)
- existing tags the FC can turn on in their activity tab (raiding, pvp, casual, etc)
will be a good start.

And FC with no members logged, or recruitment closed, will not show there.

I'm going to say this as tactfully as I can...

Baked in voice chat is doubly doomed to fail in FFXIV because... potentially shattering the illusion behind many of the extremely attractive "females" in this game is not in its best interest. The window dressing of the art, models and glamours of this game are a huge draw, and FFXIV has the graphical fidelity and... the specific morality to paint a gorgeous world full of "the beautiful people." There's an important illusion to that, one that voice chat would just wreck, unfortunately.

Above and beyond the specifically gendered issues like this, few of us have the real world charm of our eorzean selves just in general. That illusion is part of the escape. There is value in that escape.

Sure, we can all retire to discord and learn all of this anyway, but asking the game to support this 4th wall breaking, on this front, I think will always fall on deaf ears (pardon the pun). It's just not in their game's best interest to "humanize" such gorgeous specimens as the eorzean palette.

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Originally Posted by Doomguard

No voice server for the game

No free company recruitment system ingame

No general chat channel

It's very hard work to recruit players in this game. Yes, I can understand the lack of a general chat channel, (I turned off the mentor channel due to the vileness of the chat) but having to use outside forums and outside voice servers just points at a lack of concern for the social side of the game

Having to run around each single zone with a recruitment message just addds insult to BOREDOM. Standing around with a party finder message for several hours isn't anyone's idea of fun.

People are reduced to standing around like puddings using Party finder to recruit for statics raid groups or free companies because there is no real ingame alternative to using Party finder as a glorified message board.

Your systems are either flawed or brilliant if peeps don't use them for their intended purposes: - in this case it's flawed

Why isn't there at least a simple free company recruitment page allowing peeps to browse recruiting and active free companies? Even some 2nd rate MMOs I could mention can manage that!

FF14 is an mmo with the social aspect not being treated with the proper respect. A great game, full of people, but without the tools to make it easier to build proper communities to enjoy the game as fully as it deserves

It's frustrating. Worse, it's getting stale, old and boring

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Free companies have been largely ignored feature wise over the years.

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Originally Posted by Stanelis

Free companies have been largely ignored feature wise over the years.

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Having just returned to the game to use road to 70 to binge watch the MSQ from 1-70, then complete the story, then bring all crafting classes to 70... I have never actually "needed" my FC. They're good people, I'm glad they're there, but FFXIV seems to have gotten the memo that we shouldn't need each other to "play the game." I'm not surprised that such a manifestation of outdated interdependency such as the FC/guild hasn't been "supported" as much as the genre ages.

Better options for recruitment wouldn't go amiss. Definitely. I usually see people use shout chat and party finders to do it, when it could be better to use tools intended for the job instead.

But in-game voice chat, nah. It'd be more server resources that could be better spent elsewhere I'd imagine. Plus normally when games implement this as a feature, it's not as reliable or good at dedicated services. EG. although we had the option when I played the Division with friends, we ended up hijacking the Teamspeak I had at the time for my FC because it was just better. And I don't think there's much of a demand for it?

We use Discord and back when we started it was Teamspeak.
They also come with other niceties. I get how it might be more difficult for a PS4 player, but heck a tablet, phone or laptop are all options to use. I'd be hard pressed find somebody without a smartphone that can download the Discord app (or Teamspeak or any of the alternatives).

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Originally Posted by Omedon

I'm going to say this as tactfully as I can...

Baked in voice chat is doubly doomed to fail in FFXIV because... potentially shattering the illusion behind many of the extremely attractive "females" in this game is not in its best interest. The window dressing of the art, models and glamours of this game are a huge draw, and FFXIV has the graphical fidelity and... the specific morality to paint a gorgeous world full of "the beautiful people." There's an important illusion to that, one that voice chat would just wreck, unfortunately.

Above and beyond the specifically gendered issues like this, few of us have the real world charm of our eorzean selves just in general. That illusion is part of the escape. There is value in that escape.

Sure, we can all retire to discord and learn all of this anyway, but asking the game to support this 4th wall breaking, on this front, I think will always fall on deaf ears (pardon the pun). It's just not in their game's best interest to "humanize" such gorgeous specimens as the eorzean palette.

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...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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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.

First response covers basically what I'd say.

But overall, perhaps things are different on the JP side.

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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

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Voice chat in an overwhelming number of games, including every MMO thats done it, has caused performance and stability issues and added nothing, since we were all using teamspeak or ventrillo or discord anyway. If your addition isnt going to be better than what people already using, its not worth adding, especially if its resource intensive.

As the main recruiter of the FC I'm in, even if you have a board it still takes a lot of work and dedication to build up a community, especially a high quality community. I find it quite easy to recruit you just got to be willing to put the work in. I just initiate conversation with random players that are not in a FC, then if I don't like their personality I don't invite them. I also search round the popular discord servers and have even recruited members that were looking for a FC on this site. Shouts and PF are a terrible way to recruit, you will get much more success if you get to know people first. If you are not willing to put in the work then you are going to find recruitment very hard.

This is just an idea inspired by dating sites (I have no idea of which one it comes from but the idea doesn't sound wrong) :
There is nothing that allow to show we could be interested to play again with people we meet in dungeon or raid when using DF. What we somehow miss, is something that could show a mutual interest (mandatory to escape trolls) to play again with the same team/players.

I would like to see a voice chat for parties/raids.