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

[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

[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"). 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...

[Sated]

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.

[Penthea]

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.

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.

No voice server for the game

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.

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").

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).

[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

[Vidu]

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

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.

[Barraind]

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.

[ChaoticCrimson]

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.

[linay]

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.

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.

[Frosthaven]

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.