Pseudonym wrote on Sep 13
th, 2018 at 2:45pm:
Favor Runners was a unique situation for such a large guild in that the bulk of the recruitment was driven by one guy, Jephthae, who would literally log on and spam invites to every single person who wasn't in a guild. Doing that leads to far more rapid growth than, say, posting a lfm inviting people to join your guild, but it also leads to far higher turnover as people either leave the guild or leave DDO. That guild model is only sustainable as long as someone keeps on recruiting to replace the people who leave and/or quit, which was happening right up until Jeph left, at which point the guild started shrinking because Asu (the guy who took over) had no interest in spamming mass invites.
If you're looking for any more proof, Jeph came back and started Tycoons, where THE EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED - it grew rapidly right up until he left again, at which point it shrunk rapidly. But hey, if you want to pretend that things were way more complicated than they actually were go right ahead.
I'm realizing we're are probably talking about two different eras and what you're referring to most likely was before my time.
I'm pretty sure I was recruited in early 2011 into the Favor Runners (hard for me to pin-point because I started on a different server and I can't remember how long exactly I'd been playing before switching to Cannith).
When I was recruited, we were medium at best, there was a single girl in charge of recruitment (can't remember her handle, shame since she was the best part of the guild) and we didn't do blind invites. If someone was cool, nice, and showed promise in the game - they were recruited.
She left the guild during one of my early rage quits, so probably the end of 2011 or 2012-ish. After that, no one bothered recruiting. Hell, I was an officer for years and I sure as hell couldn't be bothered. Not that there was really anyone new to recruit anyways. The shadowfail years were a drought when it comes to people joining the game.
Tycoons is a total shitfest of a guild now. They're by far surpassing HoD as a hardcore newb guild. They've had to have recruited hundreds of the new players over the past few months to boost their ranks. HoD has been running at max capacity for well over a year. If someone is looking for a guild, we'll make some room. But at this point most of HoD's members are more just relatively inexperienced or casual, which is more than I can give ToT.