The biggest problem with recruiting seems to be when a fleet tries to recruit in zone chats. Some, like me don't mind as long as it doesn't become spamming (which to me is continuous messages from the same source, i.e. one person or multiple people from the same fleet.) Others consider it spam when there is only one message sent. You start getting people complaining about it and reporting it as spam for one message.
Now that being said, currently there are a few things going on. There is the forum postings for fleet recruiting. There are also some pod casts helping fleets with recruiting efforts. I say good on these sources and keep it up, however, they don't do a lot of good if a lot of the target audience doesn't know about them. Not everyone in game goes to the forums, not everyone listens to pod casts, and not everyone even knows about the find fleet menu in game (I know this seems silly, but some don't either know about it because they don't look, or understand how to use it, or they can be clueless, no offense but true.) So what can be done to fix this? Now that the fleet starbase system is going, recruiting should be addressed.
Some may suggest we tell people about these resources in game, but that will not work because somebody will consider it spam. Some may suggest starting a recruiting channel, but again how does the people that want to see the messages know about it without people spamming to get the word out on that?
What I think needs to be done is some rework through cryptic regarding this in game. Maybe in some social zones there could be some type of fleet recruiting center that people know they can go to if they want to research fleets. To get the word out they could have it mentioned either in the tutorial, or through one of the mission contacts.
Another way could be to have Cryptic set up a default fleet recruiting channel. It is on when you start a toon, and if you aren't interested, or you get into a fleet, you can turn it off. When you are interested again you can simply turn it back on. With this, fleets can advertise in chat and only the people looking for a fleet would here it. Again this kind of thing would need to be mentioned in the game UI somewhere so people know this is where to go for fleet recruiting also with instructions regarding turning it on and off for newbies.
I invite anyone with insight as to what can be done to help with this to please post. I also invite any devs to provide some insight into this as well. I want people to play spam free, but I don't want people to get booted in chat over one message either.
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