Posts: 6,069
Threads: 304
Joined: Aug 2007
Staff roles: Story Dev Economy Dev
Honestly, as a Kusari faction you're always going to be fighting an uphill battle. Kusari as a house is too alien and culturally different from all the other Eurocentric Houses to be familiar or comfortable for most of the server's players. Kusari just naturally has a lower playercount to tap into. Your entry conditions aren't going to change that one way or another.
All I could recommend to try and reverse that is tricking people into thinking you're bigger than you actually are. Lots of 'buzz' / activity on the forum, proactively doing things. Write reports about pretty much everything you do ingame. Try and encourage members to rotate who does the writing so your message dump doesn't fill up with one person doing all the work - that counter-intuitively looks worse than an empty message dump to outsiders. Preferably fly in small groups instead of alone - 3 people flying for an hour is far more effective an advert than those three people each flying an hour separately over the space of a day.
Finally, this is one method by which you can partially nullify the fact that Kusari is so empty. Using Bowex and what I've seen of the 343 as an example, try developing strong internal character relationships. Mandate RP in group chat and use it as an opportunity to develop characters, then allow those relationships to impact on the faction's broader direction. This means that even when you can't find other people to interact with, so long as you're together there'll always be fertile ground for enjoyable and deep RP.
Managing your marketing / PR is one of the more important and under-appreciated aspects of running a faction successfully. Smaller and trade factions are also basically cults of personality and will be inexorably tied to the motivation, activity and drive of the leader. Sometimes that is the core problem, sometimes it isn't. Hope all this helps.