How to maintain a successful crew

[JustHatched 12,123]

I'm gonna pass on what I've learned about maintaining a successful crew. I created Domestic Battery over 5 years ago and it is still running strong while many other crews have broken up or has just died with time. This can probably be applied in many ways to crews/clans of any game but I'm gonna reference GTAO since RDRO doesn't have a crew system in place as of the time of posting this.

First off you need to define some base philosophy of what your crew is - is it a free aim crew such as The Damned Brotherhood led by @ajbns87, or a racing crew like Van Society led by @JuniorChubb (I think VANS does more racing than anything else) etc.. etc.. And I say this because when people are looking for a crew they are looking for something specific alot of times. My crew specializes in nothing but fun and that works for us but may not work for hard core deathmatch players who do not want to do anything but deathmatches.

So let's assumer you have a dozen or so members, a good start to a player base, right of the bat you might be thinking about promoting people to Lieutenant or Commissioner and the fact is if you do not need to promote someone don't. And don't promote people based on friendship. Promotions should be done based on tasks/jobs needing managed in the crew, such as a recruitment official, events person, etc.. basically putting someone in charge of specific duties of the crew. Giving these jobs to friends based on friendship alone all to often will prove to be  disaster because they have not earned the spot and they will not do the job because odds are you are not gonna want to demote your friend. If they were never promoted to begin with then they can't be mad about a demotion, just sayin.

So how do you promote then? Who is putting in that extra effort in your crew? That's who you need to promote. That said not everyone performs well once assigned a role, but you never now till you try.

 

Next thing is communication, you should be grooming your crew to be more than a crew, it should be a gaming community and this can only happen thru communication. Be it a crew website, an area here, Facebook, Discord, whatever.. you need to have a way to just shoot the sh*t. The tighter your members feel with each other the more likely they are to stick with you crew in the long haul.

 

Rules, no body wants to lay down a bunch of rules and I didn't either in the early days of Domestic Battery but it soon became a fact of life that we needed rules. If you are just a small group of people you probably won't need to many rules, but you should make it possible for your rules to develop over time with the size and demographic of your crew.

 

Events, no one wants to be in a do nothing crew. GTAO is an old game but it is possible to have entertaining events. Discover new ways to do the same ol thing. An event I will share that my crew does once in awhile is racing....nothing new about that but for this we host a playlist of GTA races and everyone gets out of their cars at the start and shoots out their tires and then races on the rims (NO TIRES RACING). That is a way of doing the same ol in a different way. Be inventive with events, be aware of how many people you can actually get to attend and tailor the event to that amount of people.

 

Run it like a business, overall try to take emotion out of your decisions just as if you were running a company. That may sound cold but when situations happen (and they will happen) you can't make the right decision if feeling become involved. Sure, you might p*ss off a friend but over all respect is earned by making logical decisions.

 

Know when to step down/back. If you start to feel burned out leading a crew you either need to step down or something. There is alot of good crews that went by the wayside because the leader abandoned the crew for whatever reason. In Domestic Battery I once got seriously burned out and I did step down. @Dodge was handed leadership because he was/is a very trusted member of the staff. When I was ready to return he let me have my lead spot back. We have an arrangement to pass leadership back and forth as needed.

 

Don't make being a 1000 member crew you goal, make being an active crew your goal. Adding members just for the sake of having a large crew means nothing. If you looked at those 1000 member crew real close you will see most only have 50 members who actually are active. And it makes it difficult for those 50 to identify who to play with. Domestic Battery is less then 100 members, 90% of those member I can talk about them personally like they are a family member, and 90% of them can be found in GTA or RDR at any given time of day.

Focus should be made on creating a gaming experience and fun.

 

[Dodge 7,265]

This post is crucial. The early days of XDBX were hectic, to say the very least. Having a good working relationship with your staff is paramount. There needs to be a certain amount of respect between all the management staff. Crew management is no place for a keyboard warrior. Somebody that can tell you what they think on a forum, but not on the mic. 

@Hatch mentioned treating it like a business, and I mentioned the term "working relationship". This again, is very important. In regards to that, operating like a business allows you to maintain a certain level of order as long as you are fair in your decision making. If your decisions are fair and have the best interest of the crew in mind, they will be received much more openly than if your crew thinks you are playing favorites, or are being selfish. 

XDBX has come a long way. My job before sharing leadership with @Hatch, was Crew Vetting Commissioner. We have a Vetting Process in place to ensure the new member is the right fit for us, and we are the right fit for them. Something like this can help you maintain the quality over quantity aspect of your crew. Vetting is a very simple process. For us, all we require is game time with crew members, and participation in a couple crew events over the course of 2 weeks. Anyone that wants more info about this, hit me with a PM and I'll share whatever you wish to know. 

Mistakes are going to happen. Things are going to go wrong. People will inevitably get upset. Maintain your core crew values and push forward. Own the mistakes and make adjustments to improve on them. We are only human, and after all these are just games. Remember that. 

Concluding, be fair, stay crew driven, dont lose your focus. I guess that would be my recommendations for running a solid crew. Oh... and have fun for f*cks sake!

Edited March 12, 2019 by Dodge