Creating a squad
Why Create A Squad?
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Advice on Creating A Squad
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Rules On Squad Creation
- The squad must have at least 15 members who are not also a member of another squad.
- The squad must have at least 15 members who have lost their 'newbie' status.
- The squad must have played at least 3 games against a recognized squad, in which at least 10 players on each side participated.
Players that wish to start a new squad should heed the following advice:
- If you are new, stop thinking about forming a new squad for a while. Focus on learning to play and getting to know people. Gathering people is more important than thinking up a name, making websites, and designing squad banners, logo's, etc... Wasting your energy on those things, while you have yet to find people to form your squad with, merely demonstrates impatience.
- Don't recruit until you already have some players. If this seems like a chicken and egg-problem to you, you are going about starting up your squad the wrong way. You see, it's not 'your' squad. It belongs to the people you play with. You start it up together, as a team. Think about it: which sounds better: 'hi, i want to start a new squad, who wants to join me?' or: 'hi, Bob, Peter, Mary and I have decided to start a new squad together. Who wants to join us?'.
- You and your friends might decide to become visible in-game to the community, to help your recruiting. If you do not meet the criteria for an official @TAG, you can create an alternative callsign on the ASGS pages to go with your chosen squad name. There are plenty of separators on your keyboard, e.g: "callsign_TAG", "callsign-TAG", etc. After all, this is how clan tags work in most other online games.
- Start thinking about official recognition only after it looks like you will meet the criteria for said recognition. Until then, just play together and concentrate on having fun as a group.
A squad that wishes to be officially recognized as such, must meet the 3 criteria above.
Testimonials
Guardians of Doom
In spring of 2007 jgbaxter who had recently left GB was approached by a few people about starting a new squad, within a week there were seven people of like mind and they decided to give it a try. It wasn't long before jgbaxter was approached by Gestahlt to join a squad he was creating, it turned out that he'd already had 6 people that were interested. Such it was the jgbaxter and Gestahlt formed the beginnings of what would later be known as the Guardians of Doom (aka @GoD / @DooM). They spent the next week ironing out a definitive niche that they wanted to portray to the community, a distinctiveness that was there own. After another couple weeks the Guardians had 24 people together and had played two skirmishes with @SF, then things changed.
For a variety of reasons @SRM made a public notice that their squad would be disbanding, many within @SRM were hoping they could keep their squad together as it was a very public face of many players. While many within the squad left, either to become mercenaries or to join other squads, a large number of the @SRM member were fighting for their squads life. The question that came up with the members of @GoD was; "Do we really want to start a new squad when one of the current squads is in danger of disbanding?". The question was put to its' members, and the consensus of most of the @GoD pilots was to instead join with and fly under the banner of @SRM.
There are several main points that should be made, first is that when creating a squad, do it quietly and with the community in mind. The Guardians of Doom had never made any public appeal whatsoever and had only gained its members by private discussion and referals. By keeping the community in mind and working for the whole rather then a part, decide whether or not the community needs another squad, or if it would be beneficial to instead join a current squad. Realize that a squad needs to be competitive, and that this can take months or years to do, a squad will need to practice together often, to be able to have enough pilots (20-40) to be able to field at least 10-15 for a squad game. Lastly, creating a squad is a lot of work, and that work needs to be worthwhile, your potential new squad needs to be filled with many pilots of various skill levels, it should be distinct from other squads to be able to obtain members and create an identity.
Good luck. Jgbaxter 14:57, 10 September 2007 (CDT)
Links
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