About Recruitment
Recruitment is the most important thing to do when running a guild. If you don’t recruit, what happens is that over time players leave the guild or quit the game, and your activity drops. Think of it like a cycle – you have to consistently bring back in what you lose, otherwise you’ll continue “losing” until you have nothing. Thankfully, recruiting doesn’t have to be a headache! The main thing is exposure. You’ll need to get the message out that you’re looking for new members. There are a few ways to do this.
Zone Chat Keybind
You can set up what’s called a keybind, so every time you enter a new map or zone, all you have to do is tap the key of your choice on your keyboard and it will automatically toss out a recruitment message to the public zone channel of that map. It’s very easy to set up too. The keybind basically works in that you use a command to initiate the binding of an action to a specific key on your keyboard. To do this,
- You’d start with a basic command of “/bind” and this tells the game you want to bind.
- Then you need to tell the game what you want to bind to, for example, “/bind 0” or “/bind F1”.
- From there, you need to tell the game what you want that key to do, thus giving you “/bind F1 zone”, which tells the game you want that key to send something to zone chat.
- All you need to add from there is what it is you want to send out in zone chat. As a result, you’ll have a bind similar to the one shown below, and you’ll be able to tap F1 or whichever key you specified, to automatically send a recruitment message out to the public Zone channel of whatever map you enter.
- /bind 0 zone Chronic Legion is recruiting!
Direct Messaging Players
This is totally a strategy! If you type in your chat “/who 20” (or any player level) and sort the shown list by guild to display guildless players up top. You can then copy/paste a pre-set message and Direct Message it to everyone listed as no guild. Not everyone keeps zone chat open as it can be quite a spam fest, so this is a way to ensure your message gets received and read, and also a way to make it feel personal to the player, even if it is just a repeated copy/paste. Just make sure you save a copy of your pre-set message in either another keybind or in your own discord channels.
Posting Ads
There are many Discords – including the “main” one, Protectors Enclave – that have channels available for players to post their guild recruitments in. Since it’s Discord, you can add a detailed message sharing your rules and goals or even add a gif / picture to bring more attention to your post. Check the channels even just once a week and re-post as needed for full exposure. The r/Neverwinter Reddit also has an available “Featured Guilds” page that you can have your guild added to per a submitted request to a Moderator – in other words, yours truly. Yes, I’m also a Reddit Mod, surprise! You do however require a website or a link to something easily accessible that details your guild and how to join.
Anyone Can Recruit
Please keep in mind that anyone who is at a rank with the ability / permission to “Invite to Guild” can recruit, so it doesn’t hurt to encourage officers or even senior members to slap on a keybind and just toss it out to the world whenever they enter a new instance! The more folks recruiting, the more people you’ll have joining!
The Guild Management Window
It’s important to get familiar with your guild page, as this is where all your info about your guild is displayed. You can use the available features to inform your members of your rules, how to move up in ranks, and even set daily a “MotD” that displays in members’ chat boxes each time they log in. You can use this to inform members of important information, maybe a welcome message if you’re heavily recruiting or even use it as a reminder for players to farm whatever your coffer might need. To break it down;
Hitting “G” on your keyboard opens your Guild Management window. The first tab it brings you to is the News Tab. You can view here new coffer donations, if a player joined/left, stronghold progression and more. The “Vault Records” tab however has been broken for ions and is unlikely to ever be fixed, so make sure you run to the bank and check the guild bank records manually.
The 2nd tab is the “Stronghold” tab. This is where you view your Stronghold Structures, and can see what materials you’re in need of, and also set up contribution goals. We’ll touch more on this later, as it along is quite in depth and requires much detail to explain.
The 3rd tab is the “Events” tab. Arguably this is also broken, but can still be used for however you see fit.
The 4th tab is the actual roster of your guild. You can sort by account, last played, character name, rank level, etc. This is important to be aware of. You can actively check here how many members are online and who is online. You can check if your roster is full or needs some extra TLC as well here. You also need this window to remove inactive players from your guild. I’ve found that sorting by Account (A > Z) and changing the defaulted “Member Comments” to “Status” is a great way to skim through all the last login dates and remove accounts who are inactive. This is useful, as you can avoid removing active players’ not-so-played alts this way. You can also use this window to promote players to higher (or lower) ranks. Remember, players love to feel like they’re going up, and the same applies to the guild. Try to have some kind of system in place that ensures your members do get to see themselves go up in ranks with time.
The 5th tab is the tab that holds ALL your guild’s information. Your “Description” is a great place to post your guild’s expectations, rules and any other info you’d like to include such as guild history or discord links. Your “Message of the Day” is that MotD I mentioned earlier. It has limited characters but you can still set a general reminder, welcome message or informative share through this small box. Lastly is your “Recruiting Message”. In the Social window (Keybound to O), there’s a feature to ‘Find Guild’. When guilds are displayed there, their recruitment message is as well. So make sure whatever you include in this box is relative to what your guild is about, striving for and offering.
The 6th tab is where you set permissions for both your guild and your Alliance. I suggest thoroughly reading over ALL the permissions and deciding who you feel comfortable having what. These permissions go by rank, not player. Please note that it is impossible for any non-leader to steal a leadership position of a guild even with full permissions – like “Promote to any Rank”. This only works for Promoting to an equal rank to the players, not to a rank above them. Alliance settings can be found in the last tab. Bank permissions must be handled independently at the banker itself.
The last tab is for viewing the Alliance. You can peak in on other guild’s rosters and view their Stronghold Construction goals to see what materials they may need. You can also view who from their guild is online and what their rank is. This is great if you’re in need of contacting a said leader from a specific guild and need to speak with them or leave them a mailbox message. It is also in this window that you can remove your guild from the Alliance or if you’re a sword guild, remove a gauntlet. Hopefully you never need to meddle with those buttons though!
Stronghold Structures
Something every guild builds to have are Boons, as these provide extra item level and buffs. To get them though, you need to build your Stronghold and that means understanding how the structures work.
If you hit “G” and navigate over to the 2nd tab, “Strongholds”, you can view your structures, their levels, and materials required. If you double click on a structure, it will bring up a new window with full details about what the structure offers and requires in order to be further upgraded. Now, in order to get all your structures to max level, you have to work with your Guild Hall structure – that is the main focus of everything. Each Guild hall has a set structure count and level in order to advance, and every structure requires the Guild Hall to advance before allowing upgrades into higher levels.
If you double click “Guild Hall”, you’ll see a list of requirements and resources needed for each level. Bear in mind that these “requirements” are not requirements you need to meet in order to get to a Guild Hall level. It’s what you need in order to move on from that level. This gets confusing for many players, but because of this it’s generally best to upgrade the Guild Hall x2 in a row. Construction times can be long too, almost 3 weeks long at higher levels, giving you the opportunity for your guild to farm further resources.
You can also set a Contribution Target. This more or less updates your guild in the Coffer Donation window (located at the back left side of the Guild Hall fortress) and the Alliance Window (“G” > Alliance) that states what materials you need in order to upgrade. A cute little trick is setting structures based on the materials you need. If you know you need to upgrade 2 structures, and 1 requires Influence while the other requires Dark Gifts, find another structure to target that requires BOTH Influence and Dark Gifts, even if you’re not planning to upgrade that structure (or are unable to). This way, when other players come to see what your coffer needs, they’ll see in bright red “Influence and Dark Gifts, got it”.
As for structures, you’ll likely want to upgrade your Production Structures (Quarry, Mine, Lumberyard & Farm) as you need these producing as much Stone, Metal, Wood and Food as possible. These are needed as required materials for upgrading each and every structure. These structures collect their resource over time, but have a cap. You’ll need members to manually run to that structures location and using the sign post, collect all the accumulated resource. Collecting this automatically forwards it to your guild’s coffer. You must have people doing this at least 2-3 times in a day.
Other structures you’ll want to focus on are Boons (for buffs), the Marketplace (food, overloads and other markets), and the Warehouse (to increase how much your coffer can hold). Other structures are optional, and should be depended on either what you need or what will be easiest for you to upgrade based on its required resources. For example, Shards. Dungeoneer Shards are much more abundant than Adventurer Shards, so maybe you’ll want to focus on something that eats up your Dungeoneer Shards. This will take a bit of homework for you to figure out, but there’s always wonderful folks around the Alliance who can help you figure that one out, so don’t be afraid to ask.
Tracking Join Dates and Donations
It’s always nice to be able to show your members you recognize their efforts and loyalties. However, with 100+ members, you cannot physically keep track. That’s why there are actual logs you can export using some commands;
/ExportGuildMemberList <filename.csv>
This command allows you to export a full list of your Roster. It includes their join dates, last logins, ranks, levels, account names, member comments and more. In particular, it also lists a Donation Score per character, and can be a fantastic way of tracking who’s donating over time and who’s not. It includes A LOT of information. Personally, I use a keybind to export this log regularly, as sometimes it errors while executing and you have to do it twice. I use “/bind F5 ExportGuildMemberList CLMemberList.csv”
-
- “/bind” tells the game you want to set a new keybind.
- “F5” tells the game which key you want to bind it to. This can be any key of your choice.
- “ExportGuildMemberList” is the command you want your key to execute.
- “CLMemberList.csv” is the name of the file that will be exported. You can name this file anything you like as long as you end it with “.csv”.
Once you have exported a member list log, you can located in your game folder Neverwinter > Neverwinter_en > Neverwinter > Live. You’ll find the file in this folder and then can open it with a program like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
Similarly to the above command, there are other commands who can be executed in the exact same way.
- /ExportGuildDonationLog (Guild Coffer Donations)
- /ExportGuildBankLog (Guild Bank Logs)
To use these as keybind commands, just replace the “ExportGuildMemberList” with the above commands (take out the “/”) and select a different key. Mine for example are as follows;
- /bind F5 ExportGuildMemberList CLMemberList.csv
- /bind F6 ExportGuildBankLog CLBankLog.csv
- /bind F7 ExportGuildDonationLog CLDonationLog.csv
Chronic Legion 