Glueing the community together again
The problem with MMO's is that paying and playing more then one of them is often too expensive and time consuming. If your entire community only plays MMO's the chance people from different divisions will get to play together is very minimal.
I've spoken to you about this before FJ, but we need some sort of "glue" to tie this community of primarily MMO gamers together. The best glue would be non-MMO games with multiplayer capabilities that we can regularly organise events in. But even in that case not everything is suitable. The games best suited for this purpose should be:
- Free or cheap: We have plenty of students who generally can't afford to buy alot of expensive games, especially when they are already paying for an MMO.
-Easy to install: People won't bother if they have to download loads of patches and mods just to play the game.
- Easy to understand: People aren't going to bother learning a complicated game just to be able to play with the community.
- Plug and play: The games should allow you to jump in to play for 30 minutes to an hour without having to wait a long time before you get to actually play. Most people in the community don't have much time to spare, we aren't going to attract many people if we force them to give up too much of their time. Also, most games have scheduled events (Like WoW raids) and this will allow us to schedule short duration events without interupting raids/port battles/etc.
I'm sure there are more criteria but these are the main ones we need to take into account. If we can find some games that fit the criteria and regularly organise events then we can hopefully encourage people to play together. If people play together they will have stuff to talk about, which means more forum activity!
Getting known
Another method for getting ourselves noticed is I'd like to formally adopt the framework Alastriona has put in place in Pirates of the Burning Sea. I'm a huge fan of what he is doing there. Basically he has positioned our Community as the hub for players in that game. This is being done by offering a few inexpensive resources (Teamspeak Channels, forums) but it opens us up to hundreds of potential new recruits. Instead of recruiting on a player basis Alastriona now has it so we are effectively able to recruit on a server wide basis. Great!
What you need to have to be succesful as a clan/society/outfit/guild in any game is fame. You have to be known in order to be able to get possible recruits interested. This is definatly something I don't regret doing.
The best way to do this in MMO's would be to make sure you have enough members interested. A larger guild can make more of an impact on the server. Preferably you start in beta, this way you can build up fame before the game even releases, and then profit from this when it actually does. You also need to make sure you pull attention to you guild, as Firejack said: position you guild (and thus the TNGC) as the hub for players on that server(a good example of this is curse gaming).
Secondly, you need to achieve for even greater effects (best example would be Nihilum). Nemetos wouldn't have gotten many new recruits if it failed to pull off succesful raids. Sure one may say that of 600 recruits Nemetos has had only a few have stuck around in the TNGC, but its like that in every game. You need to mass recruit lots of members, even though most might stick around after they get bored of the game, to be able to attract that one recruit that does stick around. I can already predict that half of the Terra Nova Company members will not stay after they leave the game. But I don't see this as a failed recruitment policy.
I'll conlude here, tell me what you think.