Promises of Power: Loyalty, They Do Not Give

It's rather remarkable how I can manage to continually write blog entries, but haven't been able to find my muse for a paper on settler-Indian conflicts in the northwest for weeks. I wonder if there's any way I can just stick with the blog entries and get credit... Hm... W-H should totally be an elective in school.

As I write this, it appears that Kara has lost her second-place spot to Coren. Whether or not Sunset's in danger... well, by the time you read this, that'll probably have been answered. Disadvantages to a several day delay between what I write and what you read and all that. Honestly, though... From the looks of it, Coren was on all night to pass Kara. Something about it just seems a bit... off.

Eh, well, not too important. If you haven't seen it already, you should definitely check out Kyprus' profile generator. It's a nice bit of coding that'll get you as close to an HTML layout as you're going to get without actually being able to use HTML. Maybe Karl will bring back HTML for 1.2?

You've probably already seen it, but Karl has another youtube vid on the message system. It looks like we're finally getting the changes we've been asking for since like... forever. The anti-page stretch is also sweet; I hope the message feature isn't the only place it's implemented. Although I don't entirely see the point of quote tags. Honestly, I've never seen the point anywhere. Quotation marks exist for a reason, after all.

Also, we've picked up a new affiliate. Not that it makes a difference, since all the affiliate links are, oh, I don't know, completely broken? Another site we'll never get any benefit from. Not to mention that, if reports are correct, it's a freaking Warriors RP. Just having the button on the site is as much of a guarantee of failure as, say, Band joining a pack...

Anyway, on to the main topic of this entry. Today, I'm going to cover recruiting practices. However, I'm going to go a bit deeper than that, and focus on the practices of recruiting alphas and/or getting people to join by giving them ranks/power.

This isn't exceptionally common; it's done more so in the noob packs that will never actually affect reality anyway. However, it still does occur in the realm of packs with leaders who actually know what they're doing, which I tend to think of as the only 'real' packs. The rest of the packs are just target practice.

I think the obvious precursor to discussing recruiting alphas is the question of just how many alphas are needed in a pack. The answer is... 42 it depends. One alpha is entirely feasible, but it's best to have someone to help out. I would say two active alphas is optimal. Three alphas can work, but you typically wouldn't need a third one unless the others have a skill deficiency (say, coding), or they have an absurdly convenient tendency to go on vacation at the exact same time. Four alphas is just overkill.

Note that I'm referring to active alphas, at least in their position. For example, if an inactive player is pack owner, or one alpha is just a figurehead, those don't 'count' as alphas in this case.

Anyway, if you're lucky, when you made your pack you had an obvious choice for an assistant, and you don't ever need to worry about recruiting another. Otherwise, you might find yourself short.

This is where people make the mistake of advertising for an alpha. Allow me to state that this is a bad idea. Seriously. You're just going to pick someone from a list of applicants and then give them power over your pack? What's the guarantee you can trust them? I mean, pack damages don't seem to be getting fixed by staff - look at Alphyn. And what about the rest of your members? Heck, you probably don't even know any of the people very well - and you're going to give them power over your pack?

Honestly, you should never advertise for an alpha. You could ask people in other packs/packless that you know and trust, sure. But don't open it up to the public. Besides, you have pack members for a reason. Choose an alpha from them. Taking a random stranger makes a statement that you don't trust your members. That's not a good impression, and, honestly, if you can't trust any of your members enough to make them an alpha, your pack is probably screwed anyway.

Then there's offering people positions of power. Now, the majority of packs have ranks based on XP, excluding Alpha, and maybe some joke ranks, such as the Japanese Cake Boss rank in BM (don't ask). In those cases, the general expectation is that anyone who joins will automatically get whatever rank they have the XP for, so the only rank you can offer is Alpha.

However, there are also some packs with sub-Alpha 'advisor' positions or whatever. Now, honestly, that entire idea is completely pointless, but that's a subject for another time. In those cases, you could offer one of those positions, but that's hardly an extremely attractive offer. So, realistically, the only rank you can offer a player to get them to join your pack is an Alpha rank.

Again, this is another bad idea. You generally don't want to give random people power, even if they have tons of XP. Kas has 10 million XP, and I wouldn't make her alpha if my life depended on it (probably because I get the feeling I wouldn't live very long if she was an alpha). It also cheapens the leadership positions - they should be earned.

Quite honestly, though, the biggest reason is this simple question: do you really want a pack member who was willing to abandon her previous pack for the promise of power? And even if you do, do you want them as an alpha?

I don't know about you, but those are obvious questions to me. Loyalty is more valuable than XP, in most cases. Case in point:

Back when SN originally passed BM (due to Aiden screwing around, as usual), Kara left SN and tried to get me to pay her points to join BM. When I didn't accept her offer, she asked for an invite anyway. I refused to let her join, simply because I didn't want a disloyal member. After all, she had ditched SN the moment they passed BM, apparently aiming to earn some points by getting me to pay her. If I had accepted her offer, BM would be on top still. But I didn't. I'd rather be stuck in second place (for however long; I don't intend to stay there) than end up with disloyal members.

Maybe I'll cover loyalty in more detail in another entry... Regardless, the fact remains that you should use better methods than promising power and random selection to choose your alphas. And that includes evil packs - just because you're evil doesn't mean you should be stupid. Stupid Evil is not exactly the best alignment and all that, y'know?

Anyway, I need to find some food. There's no pizza in this house, and I threw all my bacon at Fang again...