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Briallan
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With the new Coursera LOTRO course starting in early July (see THIS thread), I think this is a good time to discuss where we are as a kinship and what we might be thinking about as we wind up our first year together in the next few months.

I would like to discuss several issues in this same thread, since I’ve found that in past discussions I’ve had with various kin members, many of these issues relate to each other; for example if we talk about recruitment, that involves issues like .. well what type of people SHOULD we recruit, and what are the selling points of the kinship and stuff like that. So let’s talk about this all at the same time J

Here are the issues I’d like to discuss, and I would like to hear what y’all think!

  • How well is the kinship serving its members
  • How can we make the kinship better?
  • What should we do about recruiting? 

How well is the kinship serving its members?

I think that there are many benefits that the kinship offers its members. These include: 

  • An active website and chat channel for people to stay in touch with their friends inside and outside the kin. Our website is the 7th most active Guildlaunch LOTRO website, and the 3rd most active Guildlaunch LOTRO website on Landroval (after Saints and the Lonely Mountain Band). There are easily over 1000 Guildlaunch LOTRO websites … though prolly a lot of these kins are no longer active. HERE is the list of most active sites by the way. Yes, I know our profile in the search list needs some work, it's on my todo list :)
  • Instances that we have sponsored and regularly run with full fellowships over the last few months on Sundays.
  • PvMP (Creeps and Freeps), Helm’s Deep Battles and other instances that are sponsored by our allied kin, The Knights of the White Lady, which are open to our kinship members
  • A band
  • We have many active, experienced people from Courserrim and allied kins who provide a lot of help to newbies and other lower level characters.
  • A bulging kinchest and a tastefully decorated kinhouse!

Here are some issues which I think could be improved:

  • Although our website is very active, this is mostly due to band activity (60% of the total posts on our website are in the music forum). Only a part of kin is actively engaged in the band, so it would be more balanced if we featured more stuff on other types of LOTRO activity.
  • I honestly have no idea of what many of our kin members are doing and what their goals and interests are with respect to LOTRO! I tend to do band activity, and I frequently sync up with characters who are near my level from our kin, from others on coursera chat, from KWL and from my friends list and adventure with them, but that is only a fraction of players in our kinship. Since I don’t really know that their interests are, I’m not sure if I am doing things that make this a better kinship for them.
  • Communication is sort of tricky … some people use the website regularly, some people don’t. Some people use our Facebook page, some people don’t. We can communicate via coursera chat, and officers and myself can communicate via MOTD and kinship mail (hmm…. now that I think about that… I should really use kinship mail more often…)

How can we make the kinship better?

I think the biggest thing that we can do is to build up our network of contacts so that we can offer more opportunities to our kin members. One thing I studied this year in school is the network effect (Metcalfe's law) .. the idea that a network gets more and more valuable as its size increases –  a network of 8 people is 16 times more valuable than a network of 2 people (not just 4 times as valuable). Even if we don’t know exactly what all our other kin member’s interests are, having a large network makes it likely that they will come in contact with people that share their particular interests.

One good example, I think, is the Sunday instances we have been running recently (pretty much on-level). We don’t have enough people in our kinship who are in the game regularly on Sundays with characters level 60 or so to make up a full fellowship. However, by including players from our allied kinships, players in other kins who use the coursera chat channel, and other friends and contacts, we have been able to fill up 6-man fellowships. The band also recruits its members from various kins.

Lady Ashigaru and I cross-post events on both the KWL and Courserrim websites. Bredhe has one of her alts in a hobbit kin (Concerning Hobbits) and is looking into whether we might be able to cooperate on some events.  It would be great if other people thought of creative ways of broadening our network, while maintaining our basic goal of associating with people who are ‘like-minded’ in the sense of people who have an interest in Tolkein lore and are respectful of other people and of different people’s ways of playing the game.

What should we do about recruiting?

Even though I think we can offer many fun opportunities to our kin members by means of a large network of contacts even if we stay a relatively small kin, we will inevitably lose members for all sorts of various reasons, and I plan to take recruiting a little more proactively than I have in the past.

Up to this point, our recruitment plan has basically been to wait for the next offering of the Coursera LOTRO course and hope to pick up more kin members from those people who take that course and choose to play on Landroval. Also, we from time to time add new members just from our kin members recruiting friends and acquaintances from both inside and outside the game.

Based on the above points, and even though there are some things we might improve, I feel that our kinship has a lot to offer to other players on Landroval, so I would think we should be able to use these selling points to recruit more actively, by which I mean more actively recruiting people other than from the Coursera LOTRO course, as long as they are “like-minded” as I discussed somewhere above.

Another selling point is that having a lot of new members coming in from the Coursera course could be a draw to other players on Landroval as well who are starting out with characters, since they would have other people more or less at their level to adventure with.

So, I think we should consider recruiting more actively around July when we have more people hopefully entering the kinship anyway. One way we might do this is to post in the Landroval kin forum discussing who we are and what we are doing (which we probably should have done long ago but whatever…). We could also do things like recruit on regional chat channels like some other kins do .. we haven’t done this yet, but it’s an option if we think it would be effective. But I am sure other people have some interesting ideas about this as well.

 ... ... ...

So, to wrap up a longish post, please consider all of this and let me know if you agree, don’t agree, or whatever else you think!



Last edited by Briallan on Sat May 24, 2014 12:19 pm; edited 1 time in total


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How well is the kinship serving its members?

I think we did fail to connect with many members in-game via kinship mail. I had hoped the forums would be a "Everyone found out about us in the Courserrim forums, they'll all migrate over here" deal, but it didn't really turn out that way. Since LOTRO is the realm giving Courserrim our existence, it would behoove us to communicate that way. All of our activities, events, and discussions (at least during the 'non-course' times) center around the game, so for pertinent info, in-game mail would be a much easier way to communicate with our members.

How can we make the kinship better?

I agree with your points here. Sundays I'll always be 7am-3:30pm CT, if working, so I should definitely get back into the fellowship events once I get my in-game bearings again.

Future plans:

If we can get some more regular events going, it would definitely be a good way to recruit, especially if we'll have a slew of new players coming in via Coursera. I think during that time we should just approve most wanting to join, especially if they are taking the course. It should be a time of growth for us, at which point we may be able to put some new events into place. I'd definitely suggest working with our affiliated/cooperating kins for ideas or cross-promotion once we have more players interested in LOTRO from the course.

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With regard to the forum, a lot of people, myself included, tend not to think about visiting outside of game. I've found the same experience in multiple games and the associated guild sites, some of which I've run myself. What I have found helpful is when the MOTD mentions something directing me to the forum. Perhaps this could be supplemented by and in game mail "newsletter" mentioning some of the things currently on discussion in the forum and reminding people to head over.

As for recruitment, I agree to opening the doors, in fact it might act as a recruitment tool to course itself where people might not have heard about it before.

As for my involvement, I am involved with a number of other games presently as well my my regular server on Windfola, but when the course starts I will endeavour to spend more time on Landroval and as last year, act as a mentor to new players.

 

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I would personally recommend against the blanket regional kinship recruiting ads. 

They annoy a lot of people, and in my experience often get members who then leave in a few months or weeks.

 

In the past we have had good luck with the kin forums in the LoTRO forum, as long as you keep posting so it remains near the top of the list.

 

Just my two cents.

 

 

 



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Many valid points here from all. Bri you have done a great job thus far with the guild, really stellar.

 

Recruitment

To be honest, unless I was interested in the band, or had a character that fit in the narrow level range of the "Sunday Raid", I wouldn't give the guild a second look. There's nothing here outside of those 2 components. You have to have content to make people want to join. Recruiting just because we don't have enough people to run content falls into the "chicken or the egg" category and will usually lead to people getting frustrated and leaving, as Peri said.

A better question might be how do we keep the people we have. Take a look at the kin roster in game and note the folks over 50 and the number of days it's been since they've been on last. Here's a short list of the folks I used to run with: Isenardson (39 days), Balangorn (161 days), Aloann (82 days), Morgannah (133 days), kaelrandir (199 days), Tacie (21 days). It's my experience that once a player hits that 30 day mark, the chances that they come back are pretty slim. Right now Trower grinds deeds and virtues and maybe grabs the occasional pug, because there isn't anything else to do.

I'm not trying to whine or assign blame here because a good part of it would certainly fall on my own shoulders, but I think it's important to look at the whole picture.

I think we all underestimated the time it was going to be before the next Coursera class. I know I was relying on that to bolster our numbers. I'll speak more to that in the correct thread.

 

Forums

I like forums, always have. As Pin mentioned, it's not for everyone and that's understandable. I think what has been mentioned is right on target-- Using MOTD and in-game mail more effectively to communicate kin events and try to steer folks to the forums.

Pretty impressive stats that Bri posted. . . woot woot!

 

Outlook

I've been around these types of games for a long time, been in many guilds and ran a few. There's a pretty typical pattern when a player or (especially) a group of players join the game or kin

  1.  Join game and become all googley-eyed with all the coolness.
  2. Get inspired from a more experience or higher level character(s) and all the fun things they are doing.
  3. Try to chase that player(s) level so you can participate in the fun. ( More of the Hardcore player model, that levels as quickly as possible)
    1. Get frustrated with the game and leave OR
    2. Finally catch up to that character(s) only to find they've left OR
    3. Get in with a good group of folks that are on-level and become hooked, not just with the game, but with the community you are a part of.
  4. Decide to pace yourself and really see they game. ( The Casual player model)
    1. Get frustrated and leave OR
    2. Stay the course, all the while the friends you have made are out leveling you. Takes a lot of patience and dedication for this to work.
    3. Get in with a good group of folks that are on-level and become hooked, not just with the game, but with the community you are a part of.

You can plug in other factors here as well, such as time constraints, etc., but the commonality is that you'll either grow frustrated and leave the game at some point or you'll find a community that draws you back each day. Each kin is made of both styles of players as well as blends of the two. Being able to strike a balance somehow to try and appease each category is tough, but is the hallmark of a successful Kin.

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Hi, all! As a very sporadic attendee in-game, I don't feel that should be commenting too much, but I thought I could add a couple of things from my (and perhaps others' in similar situations) perspective. I don't have much time to play, but I do enjoy playing when I can. I am very grateful there is a kinship and a chat channel that allows me to connect with people who are friendly and helpful within the game. My favorite part of MMORPGs is the connection with people and the ability to talk about/share what is going on in game (and sometime outside!). I am interested in attending events as possible, and I use the forums to find out when and where those events are. Interestingly, my absence doesn't lessen my feeling of belonging to this kinship. I think that is, in part, the shared history of the course and also speaks to the culture within the group that all are welcome. I have been in other groups in other games where someone who is rarely around is ignored or made to feel unwelcome. I think as much as possible, if the kin can maintain its welcome then people like me will stay. We may not be around to offer much, but when I am around I like to think I am participatory!

I do agree that more organized events of a variety of types will likely attract and keep members who are more interested in that kind of activity. It is hard to stay around when the kind of thing you like to do is not offered in a particular group.

I appreciate all those of you who have relatively more time than I doing what you do to run the kinship and keep it active. I have filled that role in the past and know how much effort it takes. /highfive to all of you, and thank you! Miruwyn

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I don't tend to write much in forums, however I play LOTRO very frequently, spending way more time on Landy server than my other one, since taking the course.

I like this kin very much and would like to see it continue. I also love the band, and have attended many a performance.

 

Panphidren, Baranglor, Torgorvund and Dwothgi are my 4 :-)

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First of all, three cheers for Bri, Trower and Silth for getting the kinship off the ground! The amount of communicatin and coordination that has gone on is staggering. 

I agree with what others have said: it's hard to get here and read through the threads on a regular basis to stay on top of everything. The calendar, I find, is really helpful for a quick glance at upcoming events, etc.

I think a welcome party of some sort would be a lot of fun. Perhaps we could coordinate with Professor Clayton early so the date and time could be included on the syllabus?

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Thank you to everyone that responded so far! While I hope more people will chime in with their thoughts, I would like to give you my perspective on some of the issues people have brought up.

 

We should have more regular events

 

My view of the kinship is that the activity people are most interested in is questing, doing instances, and deeding. There is a subset of people interested in the band and that activity has certainly taken on a life of its own. We don’t really seem to have a lot of interest in hard-core roleplaying. We have had some successful social events (housewarming, graduation party), but other social events have not met with a lot of interest (pub crawl, theatre night during the winter festival, attempts to organize a RP quest group, and probably some other things I am forgetting).

 

Another issue here is that band activity takes up a lot of my time, because I enjoy it a lot, and that has left me less actual time and mental energy to promote other events.

 

One thing we might consider doing is to have regularly monthly meetings at the kinhouse. This would not be hard to set up, certainly at least some other kins have regularly meetings, and I’d certainly be willing to do this if people let me know that this is something they would be interested in.

 

I would like to hear from people what kind of events they think we should be doing, and if there is something that seems to generate some interest, hopefully someone will step up and organize it … I’d certainly be willing to help.   Another possibility is to coordinate more activities with other kins, as we already do with KWL, to kind of broaden the list of regular events that are available to our kin members.

 

We should support activity over various level ranges and not just focus on a narrow range

 

I also agree with this. The challenge here is what Trower mentioned in his post about people levelling at different rates, and if your kin has a fairly small group of active players, there may not be many active members at a particular level. The reason that we have been recently focusing on instances in a fairly narrow range is that we have a group of players who have sort of made a conscious effort to stay more or less together in level, and we seek out people from other kins who are near the same level to join us instances at whatever level we happen to be at.

 

One thing we can do here is to have characters ‘parked’ at various levels (I have many characters in this category and I know that Trower and some other people do as well) so that they can be brought into action if someone would like to do small or full fellowships at that level and wants some company. I personally plan to start a new character or two to accompany the next batch of Courserrim through the early levels of the game. Another thing (as I mentioned in OP) is that I think we should be connecting more with people outside the kin to build our network so we can find other people near our characters’ levels to make group activity more easier to organize.

 

High level characters don’t have many interesting things to do

 

I think LOTRO’s solution to what you do when you reach level cap is end-game instances and PvMP. I know that KWL has an active group of people at level cap who do PvMP and Helm’s Deep battles, and they invite members of our kin to join them via the coursera chat channel as well as via posts on our website.

 

Other people who are at level cap remain interested in the game because of the music system, role-play events, horse-racing, and other sorts of activity that are sort of peripheral (if I am using that word correctly)  to the player experience as designed by Turbine.

 

So in game like LOTRO which does focus on questing and levelling up, I agree it’s a challenge for any kin to appeal to people at level-cap, if they are not interested in the above sort of activities.

 

Web site

 

So, a few people (both in this thread and elsewhere have) mentioned that the website is not very intuitive, or just not as interesting as some other websites. One issue is that we have limited space since the website is a free site, and so some space we could potentially use is filled with ads. Obviously one solution is to pay to upgrade from free .. haven’t really looked into this issue, and in fact, not sure I will have the time to do so anytime soon, due to other stuff I am doing right now.

 

The website is widget-based, so it doesn’t require any programming AFAIK to change things around. If anyone has the time and interest in looking into an improved website, I’d be happy to make them a website admin and help them out.

 

It would be nice to have more European members

 

Yes, most of our kinmembers are currently in North America, though we have some very active ones in Western Europe J. I remember seeing a map someplace of all the people who took the Coursera LOTRO course, and there were definitely a lot of people from Western Europe as well as from the Americas, so I think we should use the new course offering to make it clear that we welcome people from all over, and that we currently have some active European members to help people out with their course activities; this might result in us getting some more recruits in that time zone.

 

Other “selling points”

 

Some things people have brought up in this thread are that we are a relaxed, friendly mature kin, and that there is a good atmosphere for both casual and active players, which I agree with and am very happy that other people feel that way.

 

One other thing that sort of strikes me is that, regardless of what we do together in LOTRO, this kinship has been an opportunity for me to make friends regardless of what we do or don’t do together in LOTRO … for example, there are many kinships that have formed in one game and moved over to other games or play multiple games together ... not really saying we should do that, but the point is that the kin has its own value as a community.

 

 

Anyway to sort of wrap up another very long post, I would like to say that I’ve really enjoyed my LOTRO experience over the last year (I actually started playing in May last year on Withywindle with my dad before the course started). The main things I’ve enjoyed is starting up a band, and adventuring and chatting with all the friends I’ve met here.

 

To make a kinship an attractive place for other people who are not currently active members, I think requires action from all the kin members, not just its officers and leaders. The things I have enjoyed doing (band and group adventuring) have required me to both organize stuff and reach out to kindred spirits beyond our immediate kinship, but for me it has been worth the effort. If there are things that we can do to improve the kinship, the more specific people are about what the issue is, the easier it is to do something about, and the more people take initiative on their own to start activities they enjoy, the more stuff there is going on to make the kin an interesting place for others.

 

So, I am really happy that so many people have responded to this post, and hope people will continue to think about this stuff over the next year, as well as involve themselves in the kin to make it a fun place for both themselves and other people!



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Just on the subject of the website, I personally find Shivtr to be more intuitive for kin sites and in fact I changed my own kin site on Windfola from guildlaunch to to shivtr. http://defendersoftheright.shivtr.com/

As for upgrading, I know MMO reporter have an offer for a month free on Guildlaunch, though I don't think upgrading offers a great deal extra function aside from removing ads and a few other bits and pieces.



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Things we used to do that people enjoyed:

 

Deed nights. Finishing slayer is deeds is much more fun  (and faster!) with a group. Also exploration deed guides are very useful. Since many people do not finish deeds as they quest, this can be good for all levels.

Book Quest nights. Same as above. While not as needed as before they made the book quests soloable, they are still more fun in groups, or with a guide.

Pub Night. We tried to have a party once a month with a chest full of interesting food and drink, and things like story-telling or joke or pun contests. Or just get together to chat "in person". 

If we know dates in advance for chicken ball, we could arrange game times.

At various times we would also have nights to emote at each other if people were interested in obtaining those skills only available through that method.

On occasion we would also hold a swap meet to exchange duplicate recipes or crafting items or whatever.

Scavenger hunts are also fun, and can be arranged to cover all time zones. Send out a list, have people mail the items to the organizer by a certain time 24 hours later, announce prizes. :)

Pz 

 

 



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