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[icycalm]

I want to start this off by saying that I am 100% happy with the current status of the clan. I have a plethora of perfect gaming companions with whom to tackle 99% of the multiplayer games ever on any system ever and in any genre ever, so I sure as fuck am not complaining. If anything, I am ecstatic, because the only thing keeping me back from playing online MP games for dozens of hours every week is my available time. THAT is the limiting factor, and not the quality or quantity of my playing partners.

HOWEVER, there do remain a handful of games that the clan is not ready to tackle in optimal circumstances, and unfortunately these are precisely the best ones: PlanetSide 2 and Planetary Annihilation: Titans, the former of which really needs 12 people online simultaneously as a minimum to unlock its full potential (because that's when you have two reasonably-sized squads, and the game starts to really get tactical), and the latter of which needs several dozen people at least in order to set up a decently-sized turn-based metagame which will allow you to basically keep playing it forever.

On top of that, there is For Honor and the upcoming Dawn of War 3, which though we can already play at optimal settings, in 4v4 and 3v3 modes respectively, we just don't have enough players to do this with a good degree of regularity. And that's why I want to do whatever I can to enlarge the clan. The trick is to do so without allowing the quality of players to deteriorate. And this is where this thread comes in: to float and discuss ideas on how to do that. So far I have three:

1. Make announcements on the frontpage Social tab about games we are playing, especially headline games like PS2 and PA:T;

2. Offer sessions where guests are invited to drop by and play pick-up games with us for a few hours, the intention being that they see how much fun we are having, and decide to join the clan; and finally

3. Streaming, which we're already doing, and doing it pretty well as far as I can tell

Any more ideas, or suggestions on how to improve the implementation of the above ideas, post them here.

And let me re-invite everyone with forum access who hasn't already joined the clan. Even if you can't play with us right now -- perhaps because you are busy or you don't currently have a decent PC, which is the format most of our coolest games are played at because it is the coolest format -- you can still join our Steam group at least, and therefore increase our numbers, and therefore entice outsiders to join us, because people like to join popular groups. So post your Steam profile here, or make one if you don't have one, and help us out http://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=4710

[Qpo]

I think it's important that we are always stronger than anyone we play together with, to guarantee we are in command. So in guest sessions, which are a great idea, if we have eight players, we at most take in eight guests at a time. This way we are stronger since we are a group and they are a bunch of individuals. If they are nine however, they outweigh us in brute force and it becomes harder for them to listen. Important is also to spread them as thin as possible, e.g. making two squads with four of each, instead of having all of us in one and them in the other.

I've been thinking about auxiliary troops. Having two squads of our own is amazing. At that point I am a VERY happy sailor and fully prepared to take on the rest of the world on our own. A quick way to boost our numbers however, would be to at this point bring in a whole squad. Again it's the principle of "the stronger the core the more meat it can support" speaking: if we bring in one group when we are one group, we are tied. Not good. If we have two squads and bring in two squads, they shouldn't know each other too well. I view this mostly as a temporary arrangement, as even if we use the same "mercenaries" several times, whoever joins as a group will leave as a group. Exceptions might exist but that's almost always how it goes, unless you destabilize them etc. (but maybe that's overkill for a videogame lol). Note that even if someone joins as a group of three, or even a pair, unless they spend a lot of time with us and we split them up (or they split themselves up by sometimes playing with us, without the others), if there's a problem with one of them and he leaves, the others are very likely to follow.

It follows from the above that I think we should focus on "internal recruitment" first, i.e. pique the interest of everyone already in the clan, see who likes it enough to stick with, and then see what numbers we have. The next step would be guest sessions, and at this point it'd be really awesome if veterans get promoted to squad leaders in their own right. I am a poet and I still can't find the words for how amazing it would be if we some months in are still playing with largely the same original core group -- but now as squad leaders. And I LOVE the idea of rotating it from day 1 so that everyone who wants to gets experience doing this right away. If not everyone wants to, that's still perfect, because each squad will probably need a core larger than one anyway, and from being a core troop, having spent time with everyone (and not just any time -- the golden first spark of glory), you almost automatically become a competent lieutenant. Further, it might be a good idea to always have regular sessions of "pure core", no matter how big we grow, though I'm unsure about the frequency (every other week at minimum?).

As for streaming, it seems to be working great for internal recruitment. This is the social aspect of streaming working its magic, as per icy's all-mighty predictions. When it comes to streaming externally, to poach recruits, the best way is probably to advertise a scheduled weekly session, and then stream only that. For one, it is a "quality over quantity" approach intended to give a good first impression (the only one you get, usually). Secondly, nobody is going to watch a stream unless you either keep it running every night, or they know exactly when the show is on. Thirdly, having to wait can create a buzz (STREAM STARTS IN... 1d, 2h, 43m, tick-tock).

I am talking about PlanetSide 2. I might be taking the streaming thing a bit too seriously, but I really just want to get the ideas out.

[icycalm]

The broadcasts are all recorded, and that's the form in which most people watch the streams. And nobody watches the entire thing. I would be surprised if anyone watches more than a few minutes. Therefore, the archived videos perform that function very well -- to allow people to see what the hell we are playing, and how we are playing it -- so there's no need to complexify anything more by trying to stick to some schedule. Besides, the ideal is 24/7 streaming, so anything that might detract from that should be avoided (as your suggestion for "quality over quantity" etc. would: all videos we make are good enough quality to give you an idea of what we are playing).

Your suggestion that nine outsiders might want to play with us at the same time threw me. I had never imagined any numbers like that -- it's hard enough getting nine of us on when we plan it for weeks, let alone outsiders. We'd be lucky if we get a couple at a time, and that is the kind of ratio I want: at least three times more of us than of them at any given time. Nine guests would make the game unplayable. Even just taub straying from the squad and not listening to me was enough to fuck up my session; the numbers you are talking about are nightmarish to me. Nine outsiders per session would be the end of the clan. I wouldn't be able to keep playing anymore.

At any rate, I am sceptical of allowing any guests at all. EVERY time I have tried to invite guests into the site, in some form or other -- the Casual forum, the News forum opening for guest-posting, the Discord allowing guests, and so on -- has been a disaster, with close to zero positive results (except the arrival at the conclusion that it had been a good idea all along to lock the site behind a paywall), so I don't see why things would be different now. You missed the early days of the Discord, where half the people on where guests, flooding the chat with bullshit near non-stop, or sitting invisible all day to take screenshots of what I was saying to post on 4chan. Finally, I kicked them all out, and I could breathe clean air again. And the one or two decent people among them subscribed soon after.

So we'll see. I like your idea that we should first spend some time consolidating the clan with all the new members, because we already have several "strangers" among us that we have to get to know, and that takes time. When that has been done, say a month from now, and the rate of new members has slowed, we can start thinking about ONE trial session for guests, advertised on the frontpage, specifically for PlanetSide, where our numbers can be huge and thus help control however many guests decide to join, and see how it goes, as an experiment. It certainly can't hurt for ONE time, and if it sucks we can just kick everyone out 20 minutes in, and not waste even a single session. And if we get even a single decent new member out of it, it will have been effort well spent.

But I am now very dubious about the long-term prospects of the idea, when I think of how all previous such efforts have gone...

But you know what the main recruitment tool is? The main thing we have to do to grow the clan?

We have to keep playing.

That's it. And people will join on their own time, AS LONG as we keep playing. If we had been playing non-stop since 2014, we would have had 100 people now, I am certain of it. So this time I am committed to never stopping the clan activity, as long as I am able to.

And of course the same goes for frontpage updates, which are what attracts people here in the first place.