Hi,

I was wondering what the best method for recruiting players is, besides spamming?

So far open games, invite games, the forum and clan - clan communication seem to be some of the best, but which has the highest chance of success? Successfulness of course is rated by how likely a player is to join the clan they were invited to, and the amount of time it takes to make it happen.

If there are better methods (again, besides inviting everyone on the friends list), it would much appreciated if they were mentioned below.

- D.I.

open games.

edit: also your double post is more popular.

Edited 8/28/2015 02:59:09

My Pro-Khagans and I settled on the Open Games Multi-Day method. Open up a simplistic MD Open Game Open Seats, and just wait for people to join. Generally, invite a few clan members so that you look more "buff" and community-like (you may or may not be already, but the average noob/Open Games surfer doesn't know diddly).

Figure out what sort of player you want, offer them something they can't get anywhere else, and then experiment until you find the best method to locate such players. Targeted approaches always beat spamming.

Don't recruit for the sake of recruiting/getting members. Quality will beat out quantity when it comes to how effective your clan becomes as a community at providing for the needs of its members. Be diligent.

Don't lie about what your clan has to offer. Feel free to be confident and to believe that your clans is the best option out there for the players you're targeting, but don't make stuff up about your own clan or about other clans. Be honest.

Don't market more than you build. Ultimately, your clan's going to get more attractive to players if it has something worthwhile to offer them. You can be Darklordio and claim that your clan is #1 based on some dubious information, or you can be Forbidden Knowledge/ChrisCMU/Dr. Stupid/Blortis/[insert other successful clan leader here] and actually focus on making your clan run well and constantly improve. If you don't have quality once people come in, then clan activity plummets or remains low. Moreover, if you can show your members that your clans is really their best choice, then they'll spread the word- every AWF player I know, for example, has probably bragged about the clan's belt system at least once. Even on top of that, people outside your clan will notice how good you are- {Olympus} is well-known for having good strategic players (Hades, Nemesis, etc.) and high activity because people played them and noticed it, Dr. Stupid has on multiple occasions noted how well AWF is run. That's how you build something worthwhile. So be genuine.

Knyte That's some great advice while at the same time kind deep. Love it. I'll guess we'll find a way to contribute to the community and offer something for certain players like you said. Cheers

Edited 8/28/2015 04:19:15

^ It's really just the stuff that worked best for me when I was in CORP.

every AWF player I know, for example, has probably bragged about the clan's belt system at least once

Very true.

Here's some tips I learned from Blortis about running an effective clan:

1. Theme: Very important, your theme can be something like elitism or roleplay, but very few clans have an actual theme like Wrestling or Japanese Culture. The clans that are diplo/strategic mix rarely survive.

2. Recruitment: People say Quality > Quantity, I strongly, strongly disagree. A clan with Szeweningen, Gnuffone & Myhandisonfire might be amazing at 3v3 EU, but would end with 1 disagreement. I suggest starting with very weak prerequisites and maybe make a recruitment thread. This will attract a lot of players to the clan, most of which weak players. You then attempt to improve them. My skill on warlight was improved greatly since I have joined AWF.

3. Management: Starting a clan as one person will never work. Always, always start with your friends. Never recruit managers outside the clan, that is how clans get destroyed. Explain to all managers that you could destroy the clan by giving one wrong person manager rights. Only give people you trust 100% Manager Rights.

4. Clan Events: We at AWF emphasize this extremely. Have friendlies/wars with other clans often. Run internal events like tournaments and large clan games. I suggest with a medium sized clan trying to get everyone involved in one big game sometimes works, make sure they turn into AI after boot (not surrender) and that they can recover from AI.

Edited 8/29/2015 13:55:20

1) I prefer to focus on strategy, but diplomacies and role play seem to attract a lot of players and I've even had messages saying they wish us to be their next diplo clan. If there is any advice on this, that'd be much appreciated because I don't wish to turn down diplo players I enjoy it myself, but would like to help players improve their strategy and learn myself as well.

2) I agree with both quality and quantity in a way, believing that a manageable amount of players should be accepted, with the idea of improving them, either recruiting or creating great players.

3) Our clan started with three of us, and the other two are 100% trusted and understand not to give manager rights without the confirmation of all three managers, and we consult almost daily about various clan and other topics.

4) I am working hard to start up the events of the clan, at 15 members we should have enough to create plenty of variety in internal games, and clan tournaments seem like a good idea. We've already had a clan vs clan game with Vitrix and are currently in one with Poon Squad. I think clan events are of the most important things a clan can offer, and something that could encourage joining.

Clans can easily survive being split diplo/strat-the problem is that they are neither known for anything, or are particularly good at anything. But they can exist, thrive, and be a decent clan just fine. (like TJC)

People say Quality > Quality, I strongly, strongly disagree.

Because Quality = Quality ?

CORP is thriving, despite being a diplo/strategic mix. The dojo system is exactly what makes it work so well.

2. Recruitment: People say Quality > Quality, I strongly, strongly disagree. A clan with Szeweningen, Gnuffone & Myhandisonfire might be amazing at 3v3 EU, but would end with 1 disagreement. I suggest starting with very weak prerequisites and maybe make a recruitment thread. This will attract a lot of players to the clan, most of which weak players. You then attempt to improve them. My skill on warlight was improved greatly since I have joined AWF.

With the exception of "Quality > Quality" typo, I agree with everything here. It's through the loose recruitment that the wolves got most of our members that are now much more skilled, fun to talk to and such.

I, for one, was level 13, had zero clue of what to do in warlight and knew nearly no one by the time I was recruited. This changed. A lot.

I think it's best to find a balance in the two. Finding quality players (not just skilled players, but those who are active, motivated and willing to improve/help others improve) that will improve the standard of your clan, while also recruiting enough to do what Benjamin said.

If you recruit too many players though, similar to Darklords, it becomes almost unmanageable and hard to help every individual player, unless you had many people that are willing and capable of managing and teaching those in the clan that need it, and I think that itself would be hard to manage, without spiraling into a deathtrap with the current clan system.

Bribery.

@Widzisz, it was late for me :P

2. Recruitment: People say Quality > Quality[sic], I strongly, strongly disagree. A clan with Szeweningen, Gnuffone & Myhandisonfire might be amazing at 3v3 EU, but would end with 1 disagreement. I suggest starting with very weak prerequisites and maybe make a recruitment thread. This will attract a lot of players to the clan, most of which weak players. You then attempt to improve them. My skill on warlight was improved greatly since I have joined AWF.

I agree with you here but I think most of the issue is with our different definitions of "quality."

I don't think that quality with regard to clan members should simply refer to strategic ability- because that's not what's of most concern to a successful clan operation. Instead, the highest-"quality" members are the ones who're most reliably active and who contribute the most to the clan's development/operation- e.g., people who play in clan games, people who come to you with ideas, people who just play a lot of games in general, etc.

When I recruited for CORP, my focus was on recruiting active, motivated players (and I realized that we didn't have that much to offer to players who could get into WG/GG/Apex) that would ultimately help build up the clan as a community. These players paid off a lot- they became active in the clan, they played a lot with other players (which in turn helped those players develop), and they increased the activity level of the clan.

So, taking it from the basics, and in line with Benjamin's post, here's what I would suggest in a bit more detail:

1. Have something worth marketing before you start marketing yourself. You want players to quickly realize that they've gained something by joining your clan- something they didn't have outside the clan. Not only is this going to make them stick around but it's also going to motivate them to stay active and start contributing to the clan's operations. What exactly you have to offer doesn't matter- you could be offering the sort of active, competitive environment that AWF has, the high concentration of very good players that Apex/GG/WG have, the massive community that The Lost Wolves have, or even just the active chat community that clans like After_Dark have. This initial offering is going to have an impact on what sort of playerbase you end up with and will likely define to some major extent what sort of clan you end up with- so don't start off too far from where you want to end up.

In the case of CORP, what we had to offer was an active player community, active internal ladders with very high template variety, the ability to see the value in both roleplay and strategy, a sort of decentralization that allowed players to really take initiative and build the clan to better suit their needs, a lot of attention paid to what members wanted, high activity, and an opportunity to learn and improve. This narrowed our playerbase to people who wanted to play high-quality games, essentially, and improve a lot.

2. Don't just throw yourself out there on forums. The response rate on here is very low, and it doesn't really give people that good of an idea of what sort of clan they want to join. While it's a good idea to occasionally look over the "Looking for a clan" posts to see if there's a player you're personally interested in as a clan members, you shouldn't be spamming "Join my clan" posts. Instead, figure out where to find your players- if you're building a chat community, find chatty players in diplomacies; if you're building a strategic community, track the good people you play against (and for "Looking for a clan" posts, set them up in a game against yourself); if you're building a diplomatic community, play a good bit of diplos and scout out people that you think fit your clan's idea of how diplos ought to be played.

3. Know your players. This starts before you even invite them- play them in a game. Make sure you personally know to some degree what sort of player they are, what they care about in the game; try to have an idea of what you can do for them (obviously, you can't just completely change the clan for each player but you can slightly tweak some parts of it to make your clan better for them). If your clan's going to compete in something like Clan League, you want to have a solid idea of who in your clan enjoys (and is good at/wants to learn) what. Also make sure you engage new players in clan activities as soon as possible- make sure they're in your next clan game/tournament. You want all of your players to know you to some extent, to know that they can come to you with ideas/wants, and to become a central point of knowledge/communication within the clan.

4. Make sure your players know one another. Now that you know everyone, it's also important that they know everyone else too. Chat games help but they don't do the entire job- not even close. Instead, start throwing them into games with each other- that's what clan games are for. AWF has an interesting rotating-teammate belt/ladder for this, for example. If your clan has some diplomatic inclinations, diplomacies are an excellent way to make player interaction happen.

5. Stay informed. You should at the very least try to know when a player's on vacation and when they've just disappeared from the game.

6. Trim, trim, trim. As a manager, you control your clan's identity/brand to a huge extent. You're also going to run into problems down the road if you have a ton of inactives (try setting up a clan game using the clan name as your filter query- adds a lot of effort to figure out who was last online). You also don't want players that make it difficult to convey what your clan has to offer by behaving in a way that's contrary to your clan identity- for example, if your clan's about having fun in intricate diplomacy games, you want to get rid of someone who PE's every other game and make sure your own communtiy is solid. This is where quality >>>>>> quantity.

7. Recruitment doesn't end at the door. That's why I went so far beyond the just-recruitment advice before. Recruitment is a cycle. You want your clan to grow not just in number but in its ability to offer what it tries to offer. You also can't just do it alone- there are far too many limitations in your personal time and way too many blind spots in your knowledge. You want your members to find similar people and help you build the clan with more high-quality players (generally improving your average player quality). Each time you go back to recruit players, it should get easier- you'll start building name recognition based on how your members behave in games/forums, more people will know what you have to offer your members, and you'll slowly build up respect from other clans.

A final note:

Management matters. While we all should frown at the idea that your Warlight clan should become some sort of NationStates-style political simulator with a Prime Minister and everything, you need some sort of structure that acknowledges the realities of your clan and better ensures your clan's ability to deliver what it wants to deliver.

For clans like AWF that have really active, really good managers like Blortis and Benjamin628, it's a good idea to take advantage of active management by minimizing the cost of management to other members. You can simply have a strong management core that's able to effectively take in member input and channel that into making the clan even better than it already is.

For clans like CORP whose central leader isn't really there most of the time, you want to move a significant portion of the management ability to other shoulders while still maintaining a concentration of authority in the leader in case disputes/issues happen. This is going to have the adverse side-effect of costing you any side-leaders who have disputes with the core leader and realize that their managemerial burden far eclipses their ability to make decisions for the clan (case in point: me) but it's going to allow you to effectively operate for decent periods of time without much support from your central leader. You'll be able to- at the very least- handle day-to-day operations and ensure that your clan's able to deliver on its core value to virtually all of its active members.

For clans with multiple foci/focuses, you want to be able to decentralize and encourage member initiative. In CORP, that was the dojo system- some of us wanted to play strategic games, others wanted to play diplomacy games, etc.- so we let our members create their own environments and develop that part of the clan into what they wanted, with support from the top. This helped a lot- one of our strategic members basically found an entire clan's worth of good/improving players who integrated very quickly into the clan and turned out to be very good.

And of course, for clans like Apex/WG/GG with reliable activity, low member-count, and a tight-knit membership, you can have a direct democracy going on without worrying too much about the scalability issues.

So make sure your clan's management system is the one that best equips you to deliver on your core values to all of your members.

Recruit me!

Apollo style

MasterMind, I'm wondering if you could elaborate on Apollo's methods. I didn't really see the rise of {101st} (beyond that cringy forum post that seems to have spawned it) but from what I know Apollo had a huge impact on the metagame so it'd be cool to hear about what he did.

Even though that took a while to read, that was some seriously good advice.

1. Have something worth marketing before you start marketing yourself. You want players to quickly realize that they've gained something by joining your clan- something they didn't have outside the clan. Not only is this going to make them stick around but it's also going to motivate them to stay active and start contributing to the clan's operations. What exactly you have to offer doesn't matter- you could be offering the sort of active, competitive environment that AWF has, the high concentration of very good players that Apex/GG/WG have, the massive community that The Lost Wolves have, or even just the active chat community that clans like After_Dark have. This initial offering is going to have an impact on what sort of playerbase you end up with and will likely define to some major extent what sort of clan you end up with- so don't start off too far from where you want to end up.

I'm working really hard at this, figuring out ways offer something worth offering. Internal clan games are a definite for our clan, and as soon as we have just a few more, an internal ladder or such would be a great idea. At the moment we don't really have the potential to become an elitist clan as our members are more about enjoying the game then winning, but of course helping players improve is what we also want to do. I myself am training hard at getting good enough to at least start helping those that wish to have it.

For the issue about strategy/roleplay, maybe seperating the clan into groups where they can enjoy what they like in Warlight would be good, without making it so that the players of the clan seem to be seperate enough to be to different clans.

2. Don't just throw yourself out there on forums. The response rate on here is very low, and it doesn't really give people that good of an idea of what sort of clan they want to join. While it's a good idea to occasionally look over the "Looking for a clan" posts to see if there's a player you're personally interested in as a clan members, you shouldn't be spamming "Join my clan" posts. Instead, figure out where to find your players- if you're building a chat community, find chatty players in diplomacies; if you're building a strategic community, track the good people you play against (and for "Looking for a clan" posts, set them up in a game against yourself); if you're building a diplomatic community, play a good bit of diplos and scout out people that you think fit your clan's idea of how diplos ought to be played.

I know that the forums isn't very frequently visited by most players, and it seems to be mostly three types (Trolls/Off-Topic, Strategy Discussions and people like you who contribute to the Warlight community). I am annoyed myself by people who would use the forum for spamming recruiting threads so I wouldn't do it either. I have adopted the strategy of playing many 1v1's and diplos to find good players.

3. Know your players. This starts before you even invite them- play them in a game. Make sure you personally know to some degree what sort of player they are, what they care about in the game; try to have an idea of what you can do for them (obviously, you can't just completely change the clan for each player but you can slightly tweak some parts of it to make your clan better for them). If your clan's going to compete in something like Clan League, you want to have a solid idea of who in your clan enjoys (and is good at/wants to learn) what. Also make sure you engage new players in clan activities as soon as possible- make sure they're in your next clan game/tournament. You want all of your players to know you to some extent, to know that they can come to you with ideas/wants, and to become a central point of knowledge/communication within the clan.

At the moment I know all of our players quite well as we've had them for quite some time. Pepe, Pheonix and myself discuss matters almost daily. So for right not, all good on this point.

4. Make sure your players know one another. Now that you know everyone, it's also important that they know everyone else too. Chat games help but they don't do the entire job- not even close. Instead, start throwing them into games with each other- that's what clan games are for. AWF has an interesting rotating-teammate belt/ladder for this, for example. If your clan has some diplomatic inclinations, diplomacies are an excellent way to make player interaction happen.

This is something we can definetely improve on right now. I think the best way would be to host mini clan games with seperate players to all get to know each other, like you said. Diplomacies that have been held so far (even with AI for boot and/or surrender) have not worked out very well due to a small number of players and the lack of custom scenario diplomacies (Only some of us could host it). After more join diplomacies should be a much better way of seeing how a player interacts with the others, who needs to be talked to/managed etc.

5. Stay informed. You should at the very least try to know when a player's on vacation and when they've just disappeared from the game.

With our small numbers at the moment, it's easy to check on. But I'm still making a habit of visiting members profiles to check activity, vacations etc.

6. Trim, trim, trim. As a manager, you control your clan's identity/brand to a huge extent. You're also going to run into problems down the road if you have a ton of inactives (try setting up a clan game using the clan name as your filter query- adds a lot of effort to figure out who was last online). You also don't want players that make it difficult to convey what your clan has to offer by behaving in a way that's contrary to your clan identity- for example, if your clan's about having fun in intricate diplomacy games, you want to get rid of someone who PE's every other game and make sure your own communtiy is solid. This is where quality >>>>>> quantity.

Of course.

7. Recruitment doesn't end at the door. That's why I went so far beyond the just-recruitment advice before. Recruitment is a cycle. You want your clan to grow not just in number but in its ability to offer what it tries to offer. You also can't just do it alone- there are far too many limitations in your personal time and way too many blind spots in your knowledge. You want your members to find similar people and help you build the clan with more high-quality players (generally improving your average player quality). Each time you go back to recruit players, it should get easier- you'll start building name recognition based on how your members behave in games/forums, more people will know what you have to offer your members, and you'll slowly build up respect from other clans.

Not much to say about it, other than it's good advice

A final note:

Management matters. While we all should frown at the idea that your Warlight clan should become some sort of NationStates-style political simulator with a Prime Minister and everything, you need some sort of structure that acknowledges the realities of your clan and better ensures your clan's ability to deliver what it wants to deliver.[/quote]

For clans like AWF that have really active, really good managers like Blortis and Benjamin628, it's a good idea to take advantage of active management by minimizing the cost of management to other members. You can simply have a strong management core that's able to effectively take in member input and channel that into making the clan even better than it already is.

For clans like CORP whose central leader isn't really there most of the time, you want to move a significant portion of the management ability to other shoulders while still maintaining a concentration of authority in the leader in case disputes/issues happen. This is going to have the adverse side-effect of costing you any side-leaders who have disputes with the core leader and realize that their managemerial burden far eclipses their ability to make decisions for the clan (case in point: me) but it's going to allow you to effectively operate for decent periods of time without much support from your central leader. You'll be able to- at the very least- handle day-to-day operations and ensure that your clan's able to deliver on its core value to virtually all of its active members.

For clans with multiple foci/focuses, you want to be able to decentralize and encourage member initiative. In CORP, that was the dojo system- some of us wanted to play strategic games, others wanted to play diplomacy games, etc.- so we let our members create their own environments and develop that part of the clan into what they wanted, with support from the top. This helped a lot- one of our strategic members basically found an entire clan's worth of good/improving players who integrated very quickly into the clan and turned out to be very good.

And of course, for clans like Apex/WG/GG with reliable activity, low member-count, and a tight-knit membership, you can have a direct democracy going on without worrying too much about the scalability issues.

So make sure your clan's management system is the one that best equips you to deliver on your core values to all of your members.

Management seems to be a key factor, and so far that seems to not be a problem. I'm getting tired now, so I can't reply as in detail to this last bit.

All in all, it's all good advice I'll be taking and using, and hopefully it helps our clan grow and improve. Thanks mate.