Recruting?
Its basically a process of harvesting new souls. Clicking on random player names from an online list, and inviting them to your faction. Instinctively you seek for lower level players that are above minimal required level to join your faction. So you start to click at names of players that are lvl 10 til 19, guessing that its far more likely to find a lower level player without a faction, than a higher level player. But your math is wrong. Why?
Because almost 75 % of level 5 - 15 players have allready started and founded their own faction (Im boring even myself, but - ).

Why is this so?
I assume because 75 % of these players are under 18 years in age, not realizing that founding a faction is only the first step. And HCS made faction founding so damn easy. But thats the only thing that is easy and cheap. Starting a faction will cost you nothing, and prequesites in doing so is just that you need to be level 5.
But once you started a faction, you have to invest a lot of real money (per example you need 75 FC just to unlock an extra building slot for your faction), real time, and a lot of mind (intellectual work) in developing that faction in to a living organisation.

So its quite fair to conclude that those factions are doomed to stagnate at their very creation. But hey, i dont mind or have anything against kids. Its not their fault, its HCS's fault.

By making faction founding so easy, they enabled an accumulation process of worthlesssmall, futureless and hopeless factions. Sigma storm 2, has maybe 190 000 registered players, and God knows how much factions.

A bundle of useless and futureless factions does not help anyone.
1) HCS won't get money donation from faction founder kids, cause they'll never upgrade an extra structure and/or extra 1 % tax rate etc.
2) Other factions are losing recruting material and a lot of low level players ( kids ) who are foolishly trying to found perspective and bright new factions.
3) The low level (underaged) players themselves are beeing led trought the path of false hope that they will be able to manage and save their factions from certain fall. Allthough they could be a valuable and respectable members of "real" factions.

How is this a problem for recruiting ?

Because is anti-evolutional. We have to admit that sigma storm is somewhat evolved game with top players from lvl 50 to 55. Those players when they were lvl 5 - 20 founded or joined their factions.
Game evolved, new players came. And lvl 5 - 20 became a players who should join, not start factions.
To prevent beeing misunderstood, i have to state that i have nothing against new factions.
But i do when it become a trend. A childhis trend of starting/founding factions with no future. By endulging such a trend, lot of potential recruits, are lost due to their starting of their own factions.
Am i right ? Or do i really have a lot of extra time, and need to find myself a second girlfriend ?

Mr Dorian

I know, most people are too fast for the level content currently out. But is all this mindless, stupid and annoying energy burning quests necessary? It really kills the fun in the game. Examples? You may know the 'narrow passage', a subrealm for traversing in the next bigger realm entity. So you do the quest and the log sends you downt the narrow passage. At the end you find a door to the next realm, unfortunately one level higher than the last one. Not bad you might think, but in the narrow passage are no monsters. So you have to go back the whole line and level up, then come back again. Stupid i hear you say? No, not enough: Once you successfully managed (with severe swearing) to pass the narrow passage, you end up in another small realm with the quest location. Talk to the guy - go further, and advance to the next realm. Oh - once more a level cap. Once more no monsters to level there. Once more to go back, this time 2 levels...

Guys, you serious about this??
Ok, been there, done that. The next quest is a peace of cake, not worth mentioning. But the next two - once more energy wasters, and dumb ones: First you have to know the rough structure of levels there; L36 is connected to L37, L38, L39 and L40 (wich is currently still radiated...). So finishing the lame L36 quest you go to L37, level up and go back to L36 then L38. There you find a quest which states roughly "...you are surrounded by tachysomethings, go kill 15 and youre done...". Funny thing: the local monsters are not the tachythingies but something very different. The tachythingies can be found back in Level 37. So once more back and forth, back and forth.
Another example? Next quest. You have to repair some sewers or so, and in the mission text it states: "... Begin with the pipe North-West of here,...", but when arriving there you can do nothing. Thankfully i found a hint to the right one (Sylen). Stupid, eh?

 If you feel the same and want to share your frustration let me know...

On a personal note - new levels came out, great! [rant]
What i observed: Many players who want an easier game. Many players buying elite locations. Many players complaining. Hey, do you get the real intention of this game? Of all games?? Having fun. Is it fun buying elite locations, en masse? Where is the honor of killing one and completing that damn hard quest NOT on your own? I for myself would also prefer not having elites as final quest mobs, but it is as it is. Deal with it.

And all the PvP whiners(sorry, don't know a better word). Its not THAT hard to avoid being killed in a arena: move fast, move diagonal, avoid obvious ambush spots. If you have to repair, use hotkeys (eg. a-r-a) to move on, repair, move off. And after all, you dont loose that much in PvP, right? That few credits dont make a difference, and you're not interested in the PvP  ladder anyways, right? Oh, energy you mean? Use it in your favour - have to go to the pyramid? Just wait until somebody kills you and (sometimes) you have crossed half of the map for just 0 energy. [/rant]