What's Wrong With RHA?

[Xoria]

I was taking a serious look at joining RHA a couple of months ago, but I decided to join Workers Front instead because they were just starting up and I wanted to give them a boost. As it turned out, the collapse of Junker leadership made me feel like I should spend most of my time as a Junker to give my Junker teammates someone to fly with and that kept me from doing much Unioner activity. Once the Junker clan really and trully went belly up, the three of us remaining decided to stay together as a team and we all had a big interest in the Lane Hackers...so there I am.

I say all of that just to say that the only thing that has kept me from joining RHA is circumstances. I still think it is a great faction with a tremendous amount of potential, fueled by the extensive variety of activities available in the rather large ZOI.

I have just looked through the RHA faction post and independent forum, and what I see is lacking is a set of concretely measurable goals for members to meet. The abstract goals are well spelled out, but there isn't anything that I could find that shows me concretely what a member needs to accomplish for promotion. I grant you that a stringent system like LH has is much less workable in Rheinland due to the much tougher NPCs and the ravenous RM presence. However, from what I have seen, having concrete and easily measurable goals to meet attracts a serious type of player, and focuses their attention. Here are just a couple of rough ideas to illustrate what I mean:

To achieve promotion / medal / etc

Require pirating X number of diamond transports and X number of Niobium transports

Require attacks on X number of RepEx vessels.

Donate X number of credits to the clan from RHA activities.



Now maybe those are lousy ideas, but they illustrate what I mean : provide measurable objectives that also direct members in the direction of good RHA roleplaying.

Another thing I like is the pilot and Codename donation requirements that LH is using. I wasn't sure how well this would work in practice, but using our clan shared storage account, our members are doing extremely well with this. Pilot donations also provide a very nice side income for the clan when done in conjunction with the {SU}.

I'll just share my overall philosophy that guided every stage of LH clan development:

Limitations create Challenge.

Challenge creates Risk.

Risk requires Teamwork.

Teamwork creates Real Fun.

All of the LH protocols revolve around that philosophy, and the results demonstrate that it is solid.

As far as recruitment, I think you could really benefit by focusing on new players to the server. In LH we have a good mix of veteran and rookie Discovery players. If it is too one sided then you either have a clan that has players being pulled in too many different directions due to their multiple clan memberships, or you have a group of rookies who will just get in trouble or collapse due to lack of experience. I think solid recruitment requires the presence of RHA in space for rookies to notice them, and also a challenging recruitment process to prequalify recruits to weed out the PvP whores and otherwise bratty teenagers. Don't be reluctant to give your recruits a serious challenge to start them out. Solid players will relish it, and it will help weed out the ones would drop out after wasting your time anyway. I firmly believe that high recruit turnover and washout is due to the lack of challenge involved in joining most clans. A serious training program helps too. New LH members are trained and tested (including verbal and written exams on Hacker RP and Server rules) before they are permitted to pirate or PvP in any serious capacity.

Well, I'm not trying to turn RHA into LH, but this is the only good foundation for offering advice that I have, and I think a lot of the concepts are transferable.

I hope some of this is useful. I eventually hope to be able to delegate some of my LH responsibilities and be able to branch out to at least one other clan. RHA is at the top of my list if that day comes.

---

Check out my
Trade Development Blog
for all the latest news on Nerfs and Final Nails, or to request trade changes.

An Interactive Tour of OSC Routes  | POB Supplies