LEADING A FACTION
This guide is not a comprehensive guide on exactly how to lead a faction, but the points described in this guide should always be utilised in order to achieve a good, solid faction that people actually enjoy and have fun in. Leading a faction can be fun at some times, however just because you're having fun as a leader doesn't mean your members are. In this guide, I'll go over a few tips and tricks that I use in order to lead the SAFR, some indicators of unhappiness and lack of enthusiasm in your faction, public image, how to increase members, how to promote excitement and more. By no means am I the best person to be making this guide, but I thought I'd at least share my ideas in order to benefit a few people if they so choose to utilise them in their own faction leadership or creation.
Faction Structure Your faction structure is what your members have to be organised inside. Therefore, if you have a confusing faction structure, your members are going to be confused. I personally employ a series of ranks within the NCO team, or regular members, that allow them to actually climb through them. This boosts motivation within your faction and gives your members something to actually work towards, because if they're doing the same roleplay over and over again they're going to need something to actually work towards. This works in real life too. Many people will often strive within a real job in order to get a raise or a promotion because doing the same job over and over again with no goals in sight is simply boring, but if you finish your shift knowing that you put a lot of work in today and that your supervisors have clearly seen the amount of work you've put in, you'll be more inclined to be happy about your shift and you'll be a lot more excited to get on-duty or start your next shift due to the boost of motivation from knowing that all the hard work you're putting in was actually noticed.
Interaction As a leader, the worst thing you can do is to sit back and do nothing. You need to get actively involved with your faction and not just let people do the dirty work for you. As a prime example for the benefits, I decided to go on-duty alone for SAFR. Within half an hour, nine more people joined me because they saw that I was online and on shift. Therefore, we had 10 people on-duty and ready to respond to calls which topped SACSO at that time, all because I was on-duty. Another example includes Anderson going on-duty for SACSO. I've heard multiple people saying they're going to go on duty because Anderson is on duty for SACSO, all because faction members want to be noticed and praised by the faction leader for that extra boost in motivation. Don't sit back and never go in-game as a faction leader. Every successful faction has a leader that goes in-game and actively gets involved with the roleplay that their faction is built around.
Regular Updates When an update comes to the server, everybody gets hyped. The lead-up to the update will always involve equal amounts of hype and the actual update will include a lot of people now playing to discover the updates that have just been released. Leading a faction is no different. If you lead the same faction over and over again, not only will you get bored but your members will also get bored because it's the exact same thing all the time. Therefore, you should try and include as many changes as possible to better the faction, however don't include so many changes that your members can't keep up and end up resigning. Don't include changes to the faction that will include hassle that often, such as changing callsigns or changing the material that they learn how to roleplay from. This will simply cause confusion within the faction and force people to resign because they can't keep up with having to learn everything.
Make It Easy Making it easy for members to join your faction is a [plus, but you also don't want to make it too easy to the point where people who lack the enthusiasm to actually apply and join the faction will simply be able to join without any effort. This will lead to their mentality that being in the faction will also require no effort, which will lead to your members being able to walk all over you and the memberbase increase will be pointless due to the likelihood that they'll end up being removed.
Advertisement You want to take every opportunity to advertise your faction in a good light. This can be done in many ways, but one of the most common ways that you'll be able to advertise your faction is to hold public events. These could include general roleplay events: a concert, job fair, an event organised specifically by the faction that involves the entirety of the server, party, etc. Furthermore, you'll want to make advertisements in order to allow the server to see what your faction has to say. This works well for businesses that want to advertise for publicity, but it also works in order to let the server know that your faction is actively trying to gain publicity and gains the image of you wanting to progress the faction. You can also post information in General IC to act as advertisements,
Motivation Nobody wants to do something that they simply don't like, but externalities can lead a person on. Not many people like going to work, but they do it because of the outcome of being paid. Therefore, if not many people like posting character stories, you'll have to think of ways to reward them. One of the best ways to encourage anybody to do anything is to simply ensure that they know the entirety of the faction is noticing what they're doing so that their work doesn't go to waste. On the other hand, you can simply give people money or imply that it'll encourage a promotion. I'll be adding to this guide as more information comes to mind, which is why this is definitely not a comprehensive guide to leading a faction. Hopefully the points above will help faction leaders, or even CMD/HC members, to better their faction, or maybe the information above was stuff that you already knew.
