In Game AR Chat...how do we fix it?

As far as AR goes,recruiting has never been easy for anyone that doesn’t use a 7D tag. That’s just part of the game.

With more alliances starting daily, a bad tutorial that doesn’t show new players how to get to AR, and people just throwin up ad after ad after ad instead of actually talking with each other like we did in the old days then this problem will never be fixed.

I remember when we would have small talk then talk to a "naked"player that comes in the room, each of us would say a little bit about our alliances and that player would choose the best fit. That’s not the case anymore.

Now a "naked"player gets bombarded with messages(unless under level 10 then lucky if you even get acknowledged) or has ads that could be books to read through before making a decision which can be overwhelming, and because of that I’ve seen players just leave the room without even joining anyone.

Likely either started their own or joined one of the dead ones in the alliance search, neither of those decisions help the community with the current recruiting problem.

We can blame devs for AR, but a big part of it’s failing is due to the players. So looks like it will be up to the players to fix it. Any ideas?

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A chat administrator could be helpful.

You know i thought about that too but then it hit me that most of AR are adults,we really shouldnt need babysitters. Although someone to give us some kind of direction would be nice besides SG’s “don’t offend anyone, Alliance Recruiting Ads should only be used in AR” lol

With that being said, I don’t want to see AR become Peer Support or The Level 20+ room where players sit and play hall monitor to boost their egos

Like Rook on this forum :grinning:

Lol yes but would require more than just her in game. And hopefully they would actually hire someone and not just throw a title like that to players since many players think they have it already and I’ve seen the results of that lol

They need to find good people like her, that is the challenge.

I think a problem is the number of players to fullfill an alliance. 30 is ok for a top Alliance, but for a new Alliance it’s too many players to get and leads to inactive Alliances in the end. Maybe the Alliance points should be part of a level system that permits the Alliance to have more players.

As a newish player (~3 months) I just joined my third alliance, and I found it via the forums here. I am not by nature a hopper. My first alliance was dead: My second was relaxed and casual which is nice, but when only 11 out of 29 people hit a titan it’s too casual even for me.

I know it’s nice idea to have it all self-contained in the app because some people don’t want to go looking for the official forum, but I loathe spam ads. And in unregulated chat channels it’s always like this. It can just be one person that posts too frequently and 20 others feel they need to match the pace to not be left in the dust. So the channel becomes a fast moving slurry of CAPS exclamations and rainbow text.

And I’m not trying to insult anyone here, but if the AR channel is going to continue to be then there should at least be limits on how many times an alliance can post per hour.

I understand why you say this, but…
just how long do you think a player looking for an alliance is going to hang around in the AR chat room? With the number of alliances looking for members, the messages move quickly - most people don’t bother to scroll up, to see older messages.
I know AR chat room is a problem. It has been so for at least 9 months and getting worse. While posting in AR in the forum is a good idea - it only works for those that actually get to the forum and are reasonably fluent in English. Other languages can be posted under foreign languages section - but how many people that don’t speak English will even make it that far?

This has been broken for at least 5-6 months. If no one has cared to do anything thus far, why do we expect it now? I’ve gone almost completely to outside the game sources to recruit like Line and Reddit. Even the forum here is pretty hard to use well. The problem in AR chat is all the people that have no intention of actually recruiting in there. Naked players show all the time up just to see how much attention they can get with no intention of actually joining anyone. People with full alliances hang out there more than they do their own alliance chat just to “see whats going on”. Whenever anyone points any of this out, like “why are you people here if not recruiting”, then those people jump all over said person and make all the lurkers think they are horrible people. The Ads don’t bother me there, it’s all the people that should be in general chat making the pace of that thing impossible to follow for anyone actually using it for intended purposes.

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So what is considered broken? Are you finding it hard to get any recruits, or finding it hard to find the “right” recruit? I haven’t had that problem, I filled my teams roster from 4 to 30 in two days and as I have to replace I can usually find someone in an hour or so. But my requirements are pretty simple - I want someone who will be active and help with alliance stuff and isn’t a noob, since I was stupid and didn’t save all my lessons from the first batch.

I have seen that room become more of general chat for mercs and chronic alliance hoppers. That is what you sacrifice when you play without a solid home alliance - the chat aspect. For some reason, a large group of those players do not use general chat, they use AR. It’s to the point that people start trying to recruit in GC instead. Beware to anyone that attempts to call out non-recruiters in that chat.

interesting. I can understand them wanting to avoid general chat, the drama there is huge at times. But there is an experienced chat for those over level 20 that is quieter. Not sure why they don’t use that.

Me either. I don’t understand the allure of chatting in there. They constantly complain that the room is all recruitment ads. No crap - that’s what the room is for. SG really needs to send an employee into that room to start blocking people from there specifically. No need to chat ban them, which is the only punishment they seem to give out, just ban them from that specific room. The players know that nothing at all will happen as long as they don’t say anything inappropriate, so there is no incentive to change their behavior.

In reality - a chat system of scrolling messages is the wrong mechanic for that kind of room anyway. There should be a message system where recruiters can pin an ad one time and it’s always viewable, but that seems like a total recoding would be required.

If the alliance search was worth 2 cents, this wouldn’t be up for discussion. :grimacing:

Recruiting sucks, I know. The same issue plagued Boom Beach (they didn’t even have global chat, though), and ultimately, is the reason I quit.

The alliance search should be one of the top priorities, IMO.

There’s a post in the Ideas & Feature Requests section. Please go vote for it :slight_smile:

If they improved that, you probably wouldn’t see half as many ads in AR, as people could see everything they need (activity level, requirements, language, etc) in a list format without random comments & repeats in between.

Good day!

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I’ve been a recruiter in another game and it was a tiresome job trying to find people that fit with the existing group and avoiding unnecessary drama. So I do appreciate the difficulty recruiting in this game and that the AR is not great to use. However I do disagree with you on how long someone looking is going to stay there. If alliances could only post ads once per hour and there was no unrelated chitchat in there then yes, someone could effectively scroll through and maybe find what they are looking for, much as recruitment subsections in game forums usually have a rule about having one active thread only, and limiting the frequency of bumping. In my forum case, people were bumping their threads once a day, and it allowed the most active 60+ groups to stay in the first two pages for easy reading.

I’d wager that most alliances worth their salt have recruitment posts on the official forum and/or off-site. Perhaps the non-english language subsections allow non-english recruitment. Either way, I am sure Dr Google could help with those things :slight_smile:

How do you recruit on the line app?

There is at least one huge recruitment group. I’ve given up on that too.

Our heroic leader, @Annieb still perseves with AR chat, which she describes as causing her eyes to bleed!

What might actually work, but I don’t know how it would be administered, is a searchable database.

Alliances could upload and update requirements, language and style, chat apps used.

This could then be searched by recruits.

This would reduce the requirement for alliances to have to constantly spam chat, whether it be forum, AR, line or discord groups.

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Oh, I know exactly what she means, even if I don’t even frequent the same AR chat… lol.

I think your suggestion is excellent - but I don’t know if SG will be interested in investing time and resources in it…

It would have to be a player resource - some kind of sharable database app with someone keen enough to keep it to ticking over.