For the last time, you were not recruited by the Star Leauge for any purpose whatsoever

Once upon a time, when MAX_LEVEL was a lot lower and most of the areas still had that fresh-from-the-factory smell, World of Warcraft was designed in a completely different way.

Those of you joining the WoW party late may be surprised-cum-horrified to learn that furiously headbutting each other and being in an instance (AND ONLY IN INSTANCES OR YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME!!!1!) all day wasn't the original design intent.

If you'd put down your $49.99 for the box at CompUSA, you already knew that from the back copy:

"A World Awaits... Embark on Epic Quests... Engage an Ever-Changing World... Indulge in Seamless Beauty..." "Play solo or enlist fellow heroes to join forces with you as you negotiate the vast, battle-scarred landscape of a world at war."

And that's what it was like. A giant world and if you wanted, as an option, you could get together with people you knew and form a guild for the fun of it, or find 40(!) people and go die in funny ways under a mountain somewhere.  But it was optional.

Take an archive stroll through the patch logs and you can actually draw a physical line at the point where the management shift occurred and the design philosophy became, The point of the game is to acquire the stuff we say is cool. That's it. And you will damned well belong to a guild huge guild full of strangers to do it, too.

Ergo: guilds are only cool if they contain massive numbers of members, all contributing to the vault they will never have access to and the perks they'll be /gkicked before they can utilize effectively. So they're hoovering up every single person they can find to contribute to the guild experience total.

I bet that never comes back to bite them in the ass. Nosiree. Never.

Which brings me to guild recruiting. A Watch Constable sees a lot of it. And believe me, it's hard to keep the bile and/or laughter to ourselves.

Blizzard has provided two channels and soon an entire UI for folks either looking for or trying to trick people into find people to join a guild. These methods are roundly ignored in favor of going to the starting areas in their most ridiculous tier gear and using /shout or a macro that spams /general every few minutes to attract people who're starting new characters into their endgame raiding guild.

Let me draw a line under that. They are skipping the places people of the right level would be, and the channels which have people on them looking for guilds, in favor of going to the starting areas to try and look impressive as possible in a place where 85% of them are already in a guild.

A bigger guild.

At least, a smarter guild.

And they're probably not doing that dance.

That's the other thing. Even the (few) guilds worth being in I am pretty sure have absolutely no idea what their recruiters actually do. Realistically, if you just installed the game, your first chance meeting when you rock up on Wyrmrest Accord is probably going to be someone named something like "Sykokilla" in a loincloth attempting to hump your face and asking if you want to "join mi gild".

His guild is inevitably named "Paragons of Pure Virtue."

I bet that never comes back to bite them in the ass. Nosiree. Never.


So your recruiters are spending the majority of their time doing one of two things:

• Humping people in the face who already live here.
• Spamming their guild recruiting macro on a taxi while en route between Lakeshire and Westfall.

Just in case there was a question, that's why we just can't take you seriously.