"I don't think we should be responsible for keeping new members here to be honest.
If you invest money into advertising, to bring new people in, who will spend money, so you can keep advertising. Then it's your business to make people want to stay, not ours. We play the game, spend money, have fun. Do our thing. We shouldn't be in charge of keeping your turn over turning."
 

Everybody has an impact on the new player from the time they pull up. Why would you not want to assist a new player in hopes it broadens the player base?

If you aren't willing to fulfill the role of a sponsor (Talking to people, recruiting, and training people) then you should not accept the role. If you are given the role and can't complete it turn off the sponsor button. Its really not difficult and makes things easier on new players.

Not everyone is brought into the game with a guiding hand, I know damn well I wouldn't still be here if I just showed up one day and didn't have someone to take me under their wing. Admins make the game. Players make the experience.

When I first read this, I had concerns similar to Joey and others. Effectively, "It's not my job to keep new people here," etc. But I think if you look at the big picture, this makes sense. We could remove our jobs and go back to recruiting the way we used to (or even drastically go back to not recruiting at all and letting new guys contact us), and if we did so we would only really be shooting ourselves in the foot. Everyone knows that MR's greatest asset is its people; and the best way to keep people here is by connecting them with good people as soon as possible. The jobs board, if I understand correctly, is geared to do this and provide incentives for doing it well/right so everyone wins. When people deliberately misuse or abuse the feature, everyone loses. It's pretty obvious why this needed addressed.

That being said, I really appreciate Izzy resisting putting the onus of retention on the userbase; because it's not. If we started holding CLs, hands, and sponsors responsible for retention, then we may see admin interference in wars, takedowns, etc. to make sure "good" or "innocent" users aren't being killed and leaving the game because of the permanent death. As long as features are being added/altered to benefit users as a whole, Izzy really only needs to come out here and say "why aren't you doing this thing that's really a win-win-win?"

Though I will add, there are numerous occasions where I have contacted individuals and gotten nothing back. I think this is sorta the problem with recruiting in general; as long as you put it on the sponsors/hands/leaders to reach out, you can't know if the potential associate wants to work for you. If you leave it to the new guys, the sponsors will always know they're interested in joining and therefore no time is lost. And that's why people have resorted to copy/paste recruitment messages; it's frustrating to take the time and do something unique and just get completely ignored.

Maybe the userbase could brainstorm some more effective ways of getting new users to contact sponsors instead of revisiting features that try to do the reverse (because it doesn't seem to be as win-win-win as it was intended)?