Guild Interest Check - What do we do about attendance?

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Heyo, friendos. While I don't really make interest threads like I used to years back, I think that this is one of those topics that you just can't answer well in Discord. While Discord is great as a chatroom style messaging system, sometimes a forum just does the job better. For that reason, I'm bringing this topic here and asking that everyone put in their five cents.

The officers have been dealing with this issue for years, and it's always something that seems to rear its head at us. While it's likely just another obstacle of guild administration, it's nonetheless a prevalent one, and one that we would like to minimize as much as possible. The topic I speak on, of course, is our guild attendance. Some people might think the attendance is fine; others might be feeling the hit in the casual tavern setting. When I say "Attendance," however, I don't just mean faction/event attendance. I mean attendance as a whole, throughout the guild. Participation in the tavern, the factions, and the guild events is the centerpoint of this topic. While we're certainly not dead by any means, attendance has been getting kind of iffy these past couple weeks and it's been very noticeable.

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The topic of this open forum is simple: You, the active members, know just what gets you guys RPing, and what brings you into the RP. What do you want to see more of? Do you want to see less guild events, and cut our 2 regularly scheduled events down to 1 so you have a free day to RP? Would you prefer us to work with specific event types? Do we need to see more recruiting, or less of something specific? Get rid of Discord? More hooks? This is an open discussion thread, where everyone is encouraged to give their opinion.

With that being said, the playing field is now open to you guys. Give opinions, discuss, and let us know what you think we should do to keep the community afloat. All opinions will definitely be taken into consideration, and everything you guys offer will undoubtedly be beneficial to us as we work through the various kinks. Thanks!

-Kashya

Unfortunately the problem I run into personally is more related to my schedule, which is certainly not any fault of the guild, since I know I work unusual hours. And on the weekends, I'm more likely to get pulled into RL social life, so again, no fault here. But then, that's why I do spend the times I'm able to get on usually in the tavern. If nobody's around, then I often go off to play other games for a while until someone mentions something in Discord. As a result, though, I would likely say removing Discord wouldn't be a good idea, since it's one of the main ways I keep in touch with everyone.

Chances are if I'm not in-game, I'm dealing with real life, too. A lot of times, there's also just the individual not feeling the RP that night, for their own reasons and as Kinae said, by no fault of the guild. Every roleplay community has its ups and downs this way.

I'm also going to echo Kinae on not getting rid of Discord; it's fostered a sense of community with BSR that I'd hate to lose. I often get pumped for roleplay when I open Discord and see people talking about their plots and characters. Lately, I've noticed that we have more people saying 'oh, let's get my character and yours together for x situation' and that's encouraging to see. We need more of those player-made hooks, and the Discord is a valuable space for arranging them.

As for tavern-specific RP, it's okay in and of itself and good as a jumping off point, but it does get stale at times. If it's small, people are shy about throwing out hooks that aren't 'make small talk while we get drunk' out there or expect someone else to do it, and if it's crowded, most of the crowd tends to leave quickly as the chat scroll gets to be too much (I'm guilty of all of that, especially getting the heck out of emote range and looking for a smaller knot of characters outside when it fills up).

I feel like the full calendar might be part of the issue when it comes to events. Looking at it right now, I'm seeing five to seven days a week with something going on. That makes us look like a much bigger and busier guild than we really are at the moment.

Cutting back to one guildwide event seemed to kill town roleplay last time we did it, but it also a) didn't last long and b) was accompanied by cutting back faction events. If we cut back to one guildwide one, keep factions weekly, and stick with that model longer than we did last time, we may see some better results.

Most of the times I've been wanting to RP its barely there and I agree with everything that Kinae and Keys said. We shouldn't get rid of Discord either.

I do think we should try and open up more like we used to as a guild. I know we're not as large but if we try and have inter guild stuff it might help, just find guilds that don't cause drama. If that's not possible, try and run public rp events and we announce that its available to everyone. But announce it on like ESO RP and maybe putting some public events on their calendar. I think if we do that it would make tavern RP less stale then it can be and it would bring in new people.

Even if we don't do that. Have more zone blasts and announcements on chat

for me, it's no fault of the guild, i just have very crappy net. lately it's been cutting in and out. for awhile, my net completely keeled over. when i have no net, i just bury myself in dragon age or sims. which often leads to not knowing that my net returned until i close the game and notice it's back. wonky sleeping patterns also aren't helping me lol

but i always look forward to the events. they're fun. and even when not feeling rp, it's fun to just lurk too and hang out in guild chat while watching the various rps. also gonna echo the others. keeping discord around feels important. makes connecting with others easier. plus when the game goes down for maintenance, there's always chance for discord rp. which makes the community feel even more closer and active.

though i also agree with Aleeane too on the chat jumping. when it gets to be too much and i can no longer to keep up, i just duck out or go find a smaller cluster of people. usually the smaller cluster. easier to keep up with. or.. i just go from scrolling through chat and catching up. and then just go with saying my char zoned out, or was in thought.

also ideas for hooks, i've had a few. just.. not sure how to pitch them or go about starting conversations for them.

though i will also say, depending on what's going on around me rp wise, i just go with the flow of things mostly. not always.. but mostly.

It isn’t even that people are rping or playing elsewhere, people just aren’t logging in. Including me.

Work.[/b] For me, it’s been a handful of things, some related some not. After jan 1st, my hours were jumped to 7-9 hour days and my days off switched to fri-sat and most of that time is animation. This means that by evening, I’m brain dead tired.

Hooks are the other reason.[/b] Running or helping run faction events means putting my own toons on the back burner, since nearly everyday is something. Albeit, I’ve taken the past two weeks off from heavy involvement (not counting BA) to recover from burnout. There is only so much I can stand in the tavern, and a tired raccoon means I’m not gonna push people for responses or feed them hooks as I really need my own. I know giving other people hooks can lead to your own, but when you spend 90% of your rp time building up other people’s toons, you start to lose your own.

Inter-guild rp: NO.
To clarify, I am not against events that are open to the wider community, such as our festivals, contests or fairs.
Any inter guild plots or routine rp, however, is a hard no from me. This can be difficult for members to understand since it seems a no brainer to invite other active people to the party. And more people means some will join, seems a win win, right?

Not exactly. Members only see 1/10th of what goes on behind OOC relations.This is good, as it keeps drama low, there is no reason to spill OOC problems between people into the guild as a whole. However, this also means many people are completely unaware of the massive stress this puts on the officers.

People never show their true colors on the surface or in day to day rp. Those little quirks or annoyances sometimes bubble through here and there, but they can be ignored for general rp. However, the second a problem arises behind closed doors, those small quirks and annoyances can magnify tenfold. People you never think would bleed can bleed. People you’ve never seen get mad, they get mad. Usually, this will be bleeding IRL emotions into situations, quick-tempered responses, passive-aggressive behavior or responses, or sudden rage quitting. Less common but far more serious are flat out manipulation, blackmail (yes, this happens), bullying, or online/ offline harassment.

You don't always see the red flags until the curtain is pulled, and then it's too late.

Those are conditions that are in absolutely any rp community and game, it just comes with the territory. These are minimized by not getting involved heavily with other guilds. Just because a Gm may seen nice, or generally is nice, doesn’t mean their guild will play nice. And when they don’t, it is up to the officers to fix it.

Another issue with cross guild rp is it ultimately leads to one of two things. Let’s say people leave one guild for ours. Now they have two rp guilds. Some people can juggle two rp guilds, but they will ultimately favor one over the other. Over time, this can magnify, events are missed, and there is more investment in one guild over the other. There isn’t anything wrong with that. The issue comes if the other guild concerns of us of leeching or stealing members, even if we aren’t. Or, vice versa, with us and another guild. Bottom line: People can only be in one place at one time.

Solutions:[/b] Some ideas for improvement that I have, are a focus more on individuals in town. An effort needs to be made to learn your fellow rpers. This is easier said than done. You know Bob the Healer is an alchemist? Consider buying things from him, or going on in outing to get herbs. Something other than flat conversation. Be creative, put out what you want in return.

Ad runs.[/b] Two of our recruiting officers have been EXTREMELY busy IRL, this means less ad runs at various hours. To add to that, there haven’t been many bites when they manage to run ads. Best way to adjust to this is have more people run ads when others are offline, see when people are more online.

Big events and lots of people around look pretty good from a GM standpoint. Lots of activity correlates with success of the event or guild.

From a player standpoint though, large events, or groups of people in general, are intimidating as hell. For one, there's insane chat scroll and I don't need to explain the issues with that. Plus, if you don't know anyone, be it from another guild or as a random, you're more likely going to sit in a corner until someone approaches you or someone places a hook you can bite onto.

I'm a very social person online, I jump into events and communities, but most people don't do that, and that's why BSR gets accused of being a clique a lot. Even when I first joined when the "clique problem was at its worst" I still never had issues with getting ignored like most people do, because most people don't jump into busy communities like I do. It's just how people are, faulting it is like faulting hot stoves for burning your hand, the solution is to work around it by giving people hooks.

Solutions

Now I get that being an officer or guild leader is hard, I've ran three 60+ groups in three different games, one is still running today (somehow, even though the game and rest of community is dead), the other lasted two years, and my most recent one in ESO lasted around 10 months (and is still technically "around" but I consider it dead since activity is around 5 messages a week and no events).

Having an officer team that approaches new people to pull them in events is a good start, and there needs to be more of that. The only reason anyone will stay in a guild is if they make friends. You could argue this forms cliques, but cliques are only an issue if they keep to themselves AND reject others, and from my experience none of the cliques rejected me when I approached them for RP, in fact they welcomed me. The reason people got pushed away was because they never went to other people, which you can't really expect them to. Instead, you need to push new people into them.

Making them the center of attention in events is a great way to get their character introduced, but they'd just be interacting with a crowd, and no one personally.

Tavern RP, as boring as it is, is a great way to get to know characters personally, it's where relationships generally form or strengthen (ICly).

Player initiation is also the most important. When players, not officers, go off on their own adventures with the characters who happen to be online. This is why I think there should be a more open calendar. Unfortunately the ratio when people RP outside of a tavern or event setting is... low. The only advice I would have to increase it is to have more initiative players around, like Dank or Sanity, who often pulled random people into their own personal story lines that took place publically.

A note about ESO RP in general

Speaking of public RP, it's been on a decline in ESO for a while. There are multiple key factors in this, one of which being private player housing, which most guilds have gone to in order to avoid trolls and go wild with ERP, a very intentional move by Zenimax to reduce drama caused by both, which they get roped into via player reports they constantly have to brush off.

The golden age of RP unfortunately ended just after I started roleplaying, and I was able to taste the interconnected busy RP world (which was amazing) before everyone either moved to player housing, or outright quit ESO.

When guilds failed, especially large ones, I saw a lot of great RPers quit the game, which caused even more people to quit as all their friends left and they had few people they were connected to to RP with.

Another reason people have quit, and one that shouldn't be overlooked just because it's more quiet, is people's lives changed. Only hardcore fans of a game, universe, or MMO stick with it for long, and hardcore fans are a small minority compared to the rest of the player base. People grow up, or people move on to other things, and this is all natural.

Decline in RP in purely ZOS's fault in this case, as the ingress of new players hasn't matched the egress (of RPers at least). Every time there's a sale, the game spikes 3k new players on average, and within 3 months drops back down. With RP hidden, it's harder to find it, and harder to interest new players. Thankfully, steam charts show we're still at a peak thanks to the xmas sale http://steamcharts.com/app/306130

Now that the holidays are over, some public RP events could draw in new blood. You probs wont be able to get older people back (like me), but you can at least start a new generation of RPers.

Another note I forgot to add

Oh yeah, back on that large events thing, the only solution I have discovered that helps with the chat scrolls and general chaos, is simply separation. ZOS won't add in a "filter people next to you" setting, and heading to group simply prevents others from joining in, so in my experience the best thing to do is take a group of 2-6 and move them elsewhere. The more spread out people are, the more likely a random RPer will happen upon them, and maybe join the guild after meeting some cool characters.

I know I'm not in the guild, or even ESO anymore, but I figured I'd drop my two pennies anyways, hopefully it's still valued. Sorry for the barely formatted thought vomit.

comfy 5 player events tbh

with myself and it seems like a lot of others, there's just a lot of stuff going on irl at this time for whatever reason. while i definitely agree that small events are more personal, easier to navigate, and can be more fun because of those things, a few weeks ago we had literally no one show up for a guild event when there have been 20+ people available to attend at times. and it reaaaaally sucks when town is dead almost all of the time or it's just 2 people in the tavern afk. i think the thing factions are doing that gives people some extra jobs to do will create some hooks. idk, im bad at creating hooks of any kind and all my characters lack them lately, so i need something long-lasting thrown at me. it's just hard to find it when no one is around :/