Community Management: Supporting Clans

Hey guys, I�m Mod Timbo and I�m the head of Clan Support here in Community Management. My job is to be the liaison between clans and our content teams and be on hand to give help and advice, while also creating events and competitions for clans - like our Clan Celebration Month and Jagex Cup. In this CMBlog, I�m going to say a little about our latest series of events from the Clan Celebration Month, what to expect from our next Jagex Cup and what I do on a day-to-day basis.

Clan support comes in many shapes and sizes from the big (e.g. Jagex Cup), to the slightly smaller tasks of reading and posting in all of the clan forums. Our aim is to provide an easy access platform for two-way feedback about clans, to help support a heavily player-driven community and continue to promote and showcase this fantastic society. To help achieve these aims, we created a number of different initiatives like the clan database, �Clan Leaders� forum, clans Knowledge Base article and Clan Submissions Page.

One of the key areas in all of these initiatives is promotion of the community and ensuring that people know about clans. Getting more people involved with clans not only helps them to create and build communities of their own, but also brings more people into the community to ensure that it continues to thrive.

The Clan Celebration Month was originally an idea to get all of the clans together, have a laugh and learn more about different aspects of the community while promoting it to the players of RuneScape. From there it eventually evolved into a comprehensive series of events for everyone to get involved in. With each week themed to a particular area of the clan community, it was geared up to be a great month of showcasing what we�re up to.

One of my main aims was to create a series of events that were original and required a lot of clan interaction and involvement from the clan support J-Mods themselves. With unique events such as roleplaying an entire city or area with player-owned city clans and reenacting battles from the God Wars in �live action roleplaying� scenarios in-game, it was going to be a very experimental set of events. We did, of course, put in a few favourites such as Agility training and monster hunting/PKing with some other activities like Blast Furnace, so there would be something for everyone.

It was a fantastic month that illustrated how great the clan community is. We all had some fun, got a chance to experience what other clans do in their day-to-day life and, most of all, we enjoyed the game together.

Last year, I sat down with Mod Mat K in one of our meetings about clan support and said to him, "Wouldn�t it be an awesome idea if we could have a competition to see who was the best clan in RuneScape?". After a bit of discussion, which consequently more than doubled our meeting time, we had a very rough draft of what we titled The Jagex Cup (with a few smilies and illustrations of clans PKing each other). We wanted a competition that any clan from RuneScape could take part in and prove themselves to be the best. So we decided to run a series of combat, skilling and combination (battling in Stealing Creation where you can PvP and skill) competitions that would cater for the entire clan community.

The key was allowing absolutely anyone to enter any of the competitions we held with the only exception being the combination competition where you had to be a member to play Stealing Creation. The combat competition was based around free-to-play Clan Wars, the skilling competition was going to see who could produce the best five hours of XP in a certain skill, and the combination competition was to see who could combine their skilling and combat skills together to overcome their opponents.

What I want to do this year is go even further than we did last year and build on what the players fed back to us during the event. Some of the new ideas for the next Jagex Cup include having �specialised divisions' within some of the overall competitions, like the combat competition. This would then allow for level-restricted, pure and player-capped divisions within the combat competition, while having the �main� competition progressing in a similar fashion to last year�s. As well as changes to the way each competition works, we�re not forgetting to improve some of the features that could have been a bit better last time, such as the registration system. This is something that I�m going to be having open discussion with the community on over the coming weeks, so make sure that you check out our �Clan Discussion� forum and Clan Submissions Page for more info. :)

What we do on a day-to-day basis helps shape our future plans, be that reading ideas on certain updates to the game that would make life easier for clans, to reading the latest topic from one of our off-site clans on what more we could do to support them. With continued work on our clan database, supporting our clan leaders through their private forum, and creating events, competitions and features for clans, we�re extending the most support that we�ve ever offered. But we won�t stop there!

Aside from supporting our ever growing clan community, we have a lot of interesting ideas for clan support in the future. Having direct communication with our off-site clans, supporting our new clans so they have the tools and experience they need to grow, and working on future competition and event ideas are just a few of the areas we have in mind. These are certainly exciting times for clans in the coming year and I look forward to being there to see them alongside all of you!

If you'd like to discuss this blog on the forums, please visit this forum thread.