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So I've been part of clan gaming for a while and, while it was mostly shooting people with my favorite instagib shock rifle in the original unreal tournament, but I've also been involved with a couple of rts clans and have been musing about what it takes to get something like that up and running and what it takes to keep it there. I've also been wondering what goes into a successful community and, again, what it takes to establish and maintain that.
In theory, the first part of this is simple. In order to have a clan you need players and a certain amount of admin. For something like Starcraft, a coach for each race, someone to wrangle players and someone to do interaction with the public/recruitment. If you want to get fancy, then having a dedicated publicity person is good. That's stuff like social media presence and the website.
Obviously it gets more complex once you get huge, but initially, that's all you need to have a basic clan and a presence on the web.
So what does it take to build a community? Build something. The better it is, the more people will come.
Now we come to how these two things interact, and the oddity that is trying to be successful as a clan/community. The main problem is that the best way to get people into your clan is to already have them. You want high level players to attract audiences and members, but to get them you need to be impressive. High level players don't just sign up to the first person that comes along. They want to know that they're joining something that will last and that might get them noticed.
So until you have some, it's really hard to get some.
That then leads directly into the problem of not having the core around which you build the community. As far as I'm aware, the solution to this is content. That's why I do my "shows", for want of a better term. I do a couple of 3 hours sessions a week that I stream that have themes to try and get people involved.
I've half joined, half helped to start up a clan called AtomicEngine (which you'll be aware of if you've checked out my stream at any point recently). The intention behind this clan was to create not only a clan, but also a community, and give a decent environment for people to learn the game and improve. We've been in the position a couple of times where we've been so close to getting past that point of having a core of high level players and a couple of low level people around who want to improve. Then we ran into the problem that we don't have enough people to get more people.
Which is frustrating, because all we needed was a couple more masters level players to get the clan wars started and we can start working on the rest of it. Also, you can't just have random people join onto your clan war team. True, you might be lucky and get a good team really fast that works together and doesn't have personality clashes, but if you think that happens very often, I've got a bridge to sell you.
It's also really hard to moderate disputes within the group at the moment, unless you have all clan based communications logged in some way. When it comes down to one person's word against another, there's no way to tell what actually happened, and this isn't helped by Blizzard's bad chat system.
It wouldn't be hard to fix.
Things that are needed are channel ops and logs. That way there can be some kind of record of things that are said, and people can be kicked/banned if they start being abusive. I kinda hope they're going to fix this in HotS, but you can add this to the list of things that really needed to be fixed from the beginning.
That said, we've had more people in channels and chat every time I've streamed the Monday Madness show or the Thursday Coaching session. So maybe we can pull this off. We're considering starting a high level training night for Diamond and above, from which we can see who fits well with the existing clan war team and from there we'll see where we end up.
After all, the sky's the limit, isn't it?
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Hey. I'm a mid master/Rank 2 last season Terran who is currently not laddering but still enjoying socializing on the game and playing around with all the races. I'd be happy to hang out with you guys if you want to add my skype enemalicious
I'm also British
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I've run guilds and clans for around 15 years now, I honestly don't know what made the successful ones successful and the failures failures. The one big thing with building a clan/community from the ground up is that it takes time, both in the sense of hours put in building your clansite and the weeks it takes to get it off the ground.
I do have some general advice tho, for having the best chance at success. Even though i know you are further along that starting from scratch ;p
1) Get a core of 5-6 people that you know have the time and commitment to be your core admins, leaders and organisers.
2) Give your core guys official titles and jobs (people love having a fancy title lol). Have a command structure, so people know who to go to with their issues and a clear chain of command makes solving problems a synch.
3) Build your clansite/community site before you start trying to recruit. This is very important, have your core guys post a lot and be active before you start bringing people over to your site, have all your rules and policies in neat forum posts, make your site look professional.
4) Make sure its obvious for everyone to see you put in more hours to your clan and site than anyone else. People respond much better when they can see the guy at the top is truely dedicated.
I could list loads more but its all pretty much about organisation and dedication. It used to be really easy when i first started to make a clan, websites were much simpler and easy to create (excepting the sites that you sign up to and just pick from their templates and get yourclan.guildsite.com or whatever these days) and communities were much tighter and smaller.
I ran one of the top "fleets" in a game called Star Trek: Starfleet Command 2/Orion Pirates called RFA, there were only about 2000 people playing competitively even at its peak and recruiting the best of the best was just a matter of asking them, as you knew them all personally lol. The key to success of the top fleets was that we had a strong command structure and a good admin team.
A bunch of us from Orion Pirates then pulled together to create our own gaming company, which still exists 10 years later, though I have nothing to do with it anymore. The experience we had running clans made it natural who would do what, I was in charge of the community as my clan was known as having the best community in the game, our clan site was a bit like TL, all the other clans hung out there and we organised a lot of stuff for the whole community.
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That's a good list. It confirms a couple of things I knew already, but it's working out how much you need to put in that's the tricky part. Having the command structure was something that I'd toyed with the idea of but wasn't sure how important it was, in the face of not having the website and so on, but I can see how it helps.
I believe the plan is that a couple of the guys are designing the site from the ground up so we can have a unique look that's not just another boilerplate site. Would that be the kind of things that makes the difference? I have it in my hjead that it would, but it would be interesting to get other perspectives on it.
I would post more, but I may have to do that tomorrow, as I need to sleep quite badly now.
Thanks for the reply though, and I'll probably post again some time about how it's going...
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+ Show Spoiler [my personal clan failure story] +I was part of a shittily made clan for SC2 for a while. It was run by a guy who advertised here on TL for a clan made up of Gold to Masters players. The issue was that the some players on there were incredibly nice to me, and I have some of them on skype even now, yet the top of the top people were total dicks. I remember the clan being run by several people, I remember vividly being told that I would be kicked out of the clan if I didn't stop saying that I was bad at SC2 (as a platinum player) comparatively to the Masters players on the team. Quite honestly I was on the mid level of our team. I could never beat some of the guys, but the team just dissolved as the "leader" of the entire thing continually acted like a child. I remember that it was called Sovereign gaming, and he had invited in a bunch of people who knew each other and were friends, and they were all very cool people, yet the administration really wasn't and would bitch at the rest of us for the littlest things. I remember when one ofthe administrators openly admitted to using a program that allowed him to see a build order on the side of his in game screen (which is completely ok if it was for practice) simply to beat me with a 1/1/1 in one of the inhouse tourneys. I can go on about the awesomeness of most of the players and the shittiness of the admins, but I digress. What ended up happening was a fight broke out between the lower ranked people and the admins after the head of the whole thing said some really stupid shit and flamed a guy named NightLight on our team. Basically the team broke up, formed another team and I was stuck in the middle.
Lessons to learn:
admins for a low level, just starting out clan must be
- nice to the starting out players, because until the team is set, there really isn't much keeping the players there other than the will to play
- helpful and ready to help players out at the cost of their own success in game, this doesn't mean throwing matches, but being their for the players when they need them, on the admins time.
- able to sympathise and never get on their high horse. You can see this on TL, admins don't get all high and mighty, they are just regular guys with a banhammer who are regularly quite nice and rarely rude. As a starting out team it has to be 90% 10% respectively.
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I have read your blog and you seem like a very good-willed person. I wish you good luck with your future projects
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Docvoc - I have to admit, Team Liquid was one of the models I was looking at for inspiration when coming up with ideas. It's a tightly run ship, and has done really well for it. As a result of that, the community is a good one, and that led directly to me feeling really welcomed when I started blogging. Should really get around to posting in other areas though...
I agree with the being nice. It's always easier to keep people around by being pleasant and giving them things to do as, as you said, the only thing keeping them there is the fact that they want to hang out. If ever I end up with players that I pay, then things might change, but if I ever end up in that situation, I'll consider it the finest of first world problems.
Pebble444 - Thank you. It's always slightly worrying when you write something like this because you can't control how other people read it, and it's really easy to mean one thing and it to come out differently. So it's nice to see I'm doing it ok. 
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EPT
