There are a variety of ways to join a DOOM clan (check out the links at the bottom of the page). The most common one is to play, get to know people online, develop your skill, and then simply ask someone who is already in a clan if you can join. Another way is that you may be specifically asked. The last usual route of joining a clan is when a clan makes it know that they are recruiting new members. This may take the form of an announcement on a DOOM forum (check out the zdaemon clans forum), it may be advertised on a server list (e.g clan DMG recruiting as the name of a server), advertised on a website, or simply spread through word of mouth.
Once you have approached a clan or been approached yourself you will probably find that you will have to "try out". This normally means that you play a current member of the clan 1 on 1, if you do well or win, they may then accept you. If you have already established yourself as a high skilled player, this may not be necessary.
IMPORTANT. If you wish to be part of a clan, remember, don't go in with an arrogant attitude as no matter how good you may be, the clan will still not be interested.
Starting a clan is prety simple, however, maintaining one is VERY difficult. Almost every week on zdaemon i see a clan go out of business, so don't become complacent about the job at hand.
Starting a clan
Here are some suggestions.
1) Think about why you want to start a clan: If it is just to do well at tournament level, then you will be looking for skilled players (This will mean that you will have to be skilled yourself). If it is to create an online community you don't have to worry as much about playing skill.
2) Recruiting: This can be frustrating. If you are an unknown player, you may find it difficult to attract players to join, but stay with it. Recruiting can sometimes take weeks, even months.
3) Presentation: Present your clan in an appealing way to the kind of people you want to join. Create a clan website, doesn't have to be too fancy, just something that people can go to to find out about your clan. In the website put up a roster sheet, showing who is in your clan, maybe a clan statement about your clans' aims. Perhaps put in a contact page so that people can contact you directly from your website. Try out freewebs, you need to absolutely nothing about sitebuilding to get a site up and running there. http://www.freewebs.com
4) Word of mouth: Get your clan known, even if at the moment you are the ONLY member! Use DOOM forums, get talking to people, the more people who know you the more they may trust you as a clan leader
5) A few tricks: Good publicity in DOOM is getting people to see you playing. FFA(See intro to DOOM page) is very good for this. If people see you doing well, they may ask about your clan. You may even end a game that you have performed well in with "GG, would anyone like to join clan (whatever your clan name is)" People are more liely to want to join if you atleast show that you are a competent player.
Maintaining a clan
Maintaining a clan is the hardest part. Once your clan has been formed it can be VERY difficult to keep it together, here's some suggestions on how to.
1) Structure: After recruiting a good number of members, lets say 8, it is good to structure the hierarchy of the clan after a while. So, you will be clan leader, you may have a second in command, a recruiter (there job is to seek out new members), a trainer (a skilled player who can help the rest of your clan get better), a mapper (someone in charge of putting together a WAD that your clan may wish to share with the community), the list is endless as to what your top members can do (website builder, chat page admin, morale officer, promoter, etc)
2) Diplomacy: You have to be extremely diplomatic and approachable to succeed as a clan leader, not just with other clans, but with your own members. There are bound to be problems, be as impartial and fair as possible and try to be decisive, you WILL succeed if you maintain this.
3) Recruitment drives: The sad fact is that most of your clan members probably (not always) won't work out. They may leave the clan, never be online, or perhaps they will have real life commitments that will hinder them from being an active member. Due to this , recruit new members, wait to see who you think will work out, then recruit again. You will need to recruit every now and then to keep a large number of active members.Don't get rid of inactive members, just pur them on an inactive list until you see them again, they may become more active in the future.
4) Communication: Communicate with your clan as much as possible, setup a forum or an irc channel. Have clan emails sent out if you can't do this. This will make sure that everyone stays in the loop and knows what is going on.
5) Democracy: I for one think it is better to have one clan leader with a 2nd, 3rd and 4th, in charge when you clan gets bigger. This means that if you are away you can leave your clan in safe hands. Some clans however choose to have a democratic system with more of a chairman than a leader and the whole clan votes on it. If you feel this is best for you, go for it!
Clan wars are basically the best way to test your clans development. This involves issuing a challenge to another clan to compete against each other. This often involves CTF, but can incorporate teamDM and even 1 on 1's. First off there are 3 things you will want to do
1) Find out and contact the leader of the clan you wish to challenge.
2) Post a thread in the Zdaemon forums in the clan section here :-
3)Set out in this thread your conditions of war and a set of rules that should be followed.
In your thread you will want to post your roster for the war. Normally this can't be changed unless both clans agree to it, this is to avoid clans "recruiting" new members and throwing them into the war, when often they are good players in other clans who just use a pseudonym. So don't let your clan get screwed by this old trick!
You will also want to post the game types you will be using and the maps for each game type. If you are only competing in CTF then you might want to play most flags over 10 or so games. If you add 1 on 1 to this you could simply equate each flag capture as 10 frags and add everything together in the end, most frags wins. This can also be done with TeamDM. A note on ping, remember this is very important so if you feel your team is at a severe disadvantage in ping, then make sure you play home and away ties i.e. some games you play ona server of your choosing and others on your opponent's choice of server.
Make sure you record a demo of the games incase there is anything that needs settled after a fight.
Once the war is over, post the results in the thread and don't worry if you lose your first few wars, most clans do. Perhaps start off with a clan that is at a similar level to yours.
Zdaemon clans - http://www.zdaemon.org -
Odamex clans
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