Clan Spotlight: Red Sky 05/04/15
Дата: 04.05.2015 20:49:59
veganzombiez: Frizzled07– Commander of Red Sky.
Yotaman – Executive Officer. Scharnhorst310 – Former officer and
leader. TomECannon – Former officer and
leader.
Character and competence define Red Sky, the latest Clan to be featured on this week’s Clan Spotlight. RS has made a name as one of the oldest and most respected Clans in World of Tanks. As part of a larger gaming community, RS provides a comfortable community that current and former members fondly call their home. What’s the story of Red Sky? TomECannon: RS was really competitive in Navyfield before converting to World of Tanks in beta, and went to the first URAL Steel tournament. Scharn and I saw them on the front page, and that’s how we got involved. Luckily, we were able to participate in URAL Steel the second year as well. Scharnhorst310: We were looking to join a clan that was on the up and up that we could learn from. RS was fairly established at that point and they were on CW map. The clan population ballooned when Clan Wars first started. Since clans were limited to 100 members, RS created both RS and Red Sky Red Dawn Division to handle all of it's members. Many long term members were in RS, and RSRDD filled up with newer membership. RSRDD became very competitive very quickly. Me, TomE, and Mako26 all started in RSRDD. After a period of time, RSRRD ended up very strong in CW, and us new guys began to have a leadership role. Then it was determined that it’d be better to merge the best players from RS and RSRDD into RS and have a single strong CW division. We continue to cycle members between divisions to remain competitive on the map and in the game. TomECannon: Mako took over because he was the only one with major battle and leadership experience, and scharn was the #2 as a strategy and battle leader. At that time, you only needed 2 teams because of how the offsets worked. Our 2 teams were really good, and we had a bunch of flank callers and battle leaders around most of the time. Scharnhorst310: Really “good” in relative terms. We were part of the big alliance at the time, NASA, as one of the smaller clans just vying for scraps at the table of all the big guys. Luckily, we had a lot of really good leaders and officer who worked very hard, and we had very dedicated players so we could count on the same teams coming on every night. Over months of hitting landing zones, which you could do back then in the day to cover for other clans, we got better. We didn’t know how good we were because we weren’t facing the top competition, who were all in NASA. TomECannon: And then NASA broke up... for some reason... Scharnhorst310: Long story short, nobody wanted to share the scraps with the little guys. They felt what they felt, and we felt what we felt, and they formed up. It’s hard to describe if you’re not looking at the old European map, but we were in Northern Russia, right next toSSGS, BPN, MLP, andWOLF. Our position put us in the most dangerous spot, but also the only spot where a clan could hurt them right away. When the war started, no one expected us to do well, not even us, but something just clicked. We got the right maps with the right players and before we knew it, we went from one team a night to two, three, four, then five teams, and we started beating guys up. Eventually, we started pushing out, and probably my favorite battle, we beat MLP and they disbanded the next day. I don’t know if that was because of us, but I will say it was an important battle for morale as they represented what we were fighting against. I’d also be remiss not mentioning tremendous help we had from our members: whiskey_dod, absoluteroyal, Boggintuf, just to name a few. TomECannon: For us especially. Then recruitment just shot up too, that was great. Our domain was Eastern Russia, and no one wanted to attack us, so that was the first farming we’d ever done. Scharnhorst310: Before we knew it, we’d become famous, we’d become the big dogs. We were making 18-20k gold a night, and that was our first experience with people saying, “You guys are very good. Oh please, we don’t want to fight you.” The problem was that our guys weren’t the farming types, they didn’t care about how much gold they were getting; they wanted to fight. Eventually, our attendance started dropping drastically. It was a delicate position to be in: At one point, we went from Stalingrad to Denmark trying to find clans to fight, not out of malice, but just trying to keep members happy. Yotaman: That’s still the case. If we sit, we lose. Scharnhorst310: That became our motto: “We have to fight.” If we don’t, no one shows up, we start losing attendance, and before you know it, we’re weak and destitute. TomECannon: That’s the scariest thing. We didn't really care about the gold, so no one could appease RS with farming. They’re gonna attack and start a war. They’ll stay together and maintain that high morale as long as they keep fighting. Scharnhorst310: We like fighting, but it’s hard diplo to always work around that. I thought we did the best we could. We were always up front, always honorable, never backstabbers, everyone always got notice. If we were gonna attack a neighbor, we’d let them know, jump off the map, and then come back, because you don’t get close to someone along their borders and then jump them. It doesn’t work like that. Since RS really enjoys fighting, are you disappointed you weren’t in the Civil War? Frizzled07: It pissed me off because the clan that was selected like, #10 overall, we’d just mapped them twice on the West Coast. And we didn’t get picked at all. That pissed me off pretty good. Scharnhorst310: I was watching the whole thing, and I gotta be honest, I was shocked. I was shocked at some of the clans that were picked because RS’s reputation is that they’re gonna fight, they’re gonna fight tooth and nail and they’re gonna jump on grenades for clans. But I understand it from the standpoint that the guys picking the teams aren’t old dogs, they haven’t been around. It’s a new generation running things. That’s how Tom and I look at RS today: we’ve passed the torch to Frizz. It’s a new generation running things, and that’s something I don’t think they appreciated. TomECannon: I think I’d just joinedOTTER a few months before that, and I was really upset that RS wasn’t picked. One of the biggest travesties has been the addition of WN8. I’m not a unicum player, but what was special about RS was that we had a lot of players that are marked as “Good”, “Above Average”, or even “Average” on the new WN8 scale and were competitive. I would pick a lot of the "average" players over the top percent of players because they’re willing to take hits for each other and not care about their stats, and I think that was the most important thing. When battle callers are picking teams, they’re picking based on the highest win rate or WN8 or whatever, and not picking the teams that are the most effective and resilient. If you look at who won the Civil War or any war, oftentimes those clans that are on the fringe, that are meant to withstand as long as possible, they bail out, and they don’t give it their all, and they end up being a "let down" for the top clans that are fighting against the other top clans. I think it would’ve been very different if RS had been picked, based on resiliency alone. Scharnhorst310: We always punched above our weight class. We beat some of the top teams, and we wouldn’t always match them statistically in player skill, but you could count on our guys who had been playing together for a long time to perform. You could count on our officers and battle callers, our strategy, and the time we put in. We always had a shot. I’d go into every first battle with a clan and say, “Look, I never expect to win the first battle, but you can bet the second time we’re gonna have a chance because we’re gonna do our homework.” They might get lazy or sloppy after a win, but we don’t, and we’re gonna keep hitting them until we’ve got everything down on everything they’ve thrown at us, and we don’t stop. That resiliency, that dedication, is something that a lot of clans or their leaders don’t have, or aren’t prepared for. TomECannon: Look at how many clans have disbanded over the past few years, and RS is still chugging along with a lot of the same old members that are still competing today. Would you consider your success after NASA to be your greatest accomplishment? Scharnhorst310: It’s really hard to say which accomplishment we’ve had is the greatest. There’s quite a few that I’ve looked back on and I’m like, “That’s impossible. There’s no way”. Our joke in RS is that we won Clan Wars. Obviously that’s impossible, but in moments like those, we’d all sit back and laugh, “We won Clan Wars.” TomECannon: Every time we were involved, Clan Wars would change somehow: either the rules would change or a clan would disband. We used to be in Russia with-G- when they were first starting up, and we built a good relationship with them. The strong relationships RS built are, to me, RS’s greatest accomplishments. Scharnhorst310: Beating MLP was big because we were treated as little dogs during all those long meetings. It felt good to get some recognition for the months of hard work we’d done at that point: we knocked out ROTA, who’d been sitting on Brandenburg in Europe for 239 days. Nobody had been able to dislodge them before that. At one point, RS stretched from Eastern Russia all the way across Europe. There were a lot of accomplishments along the way that were all basically thought of as impossible, and we couldn’t have done it without friends and allies.. Yotaman: A source of pride for RS is how many times we went to URAL Steel. Frizzled07: While our history in Clan Wars is pretty illustrious, our success in tourneys might be even better. The first year ofWGLNA, we sent 2 teams to the finals, and that was while fighting a war at the same time. So we have a pretty big history in Clan Wars, tournaments, and now Strongholds too. You guys obviously have a lot of success. What advice do you have for clans struggling to find a place on the Global Map? TomECannon: We found success by being an honorable clan, and figuring out who was really dedicated to the clan and wasn’t gonna jump ship when things turned sour. Our players train each other, build each other up by saying, “If you just do this differently…” The members of RS take criticism well. I don’t, but RS does. In any other major clan or community, there’s like 100 different channels for people to hide in. In the RS TeamSpeak, you’re in the lobby or a platoon or company channel. I think the community aspect of the TeamSpeak channel overall is what helped make us successful. Scharnhorst310: I help out a lot of new clans, and the big thing I see is that they’re cliquey. One group wants to be dedicated and improve as a team in training rooms, and another group won’t be as dedicated. That’s painful for the group that wants to improve because you’re only as strong as your weakest link in Clan Wars, and if you have a few guys who don’t listen or do something wrong, it’s very hard to compete on a consistent basis. Everyone gets frustrated, and the clan falls apart. My recruiting phrase in RS was “I’m trying to find if RS is a good fit for you, and if you’re a good fit for RS.” The point is, you can’t recruit with mass invites, or be loose with who you let in. You’re trying build a strong foundation through recruitment that represents the values and desires of the clan, on top of its personality. If you don’t, clans tend to fracture when they experience setbacks or difficulties. Yotaman: We still say that to every applicant. We make them come and play and spend time. We don’t just take somebody; we find personality fits along with playstyle fits. We are as open and upfront as possible so that recruits can make the most informed decision for themselves as to whether RS is a good fit. How does someone apply to RS? Yotaman: Applicants apply on our clan website, come to our TeamSpeak to get applicant tags, and then they play with people in the clan. It’s not a quick process, and eventually our officers and NCOs vote on you. TomECannon: There’s a lot of trust in the officer core to find applicants that fit. We didn’t just recruit based on skill; that was secondary to whether that person would mesh well. A lot of that is due to the maturity of each member to know that the future is really in their hands. The membership would come to me or scharn about a recruit saying, “I platooned with this guy, this is what happened, and here’s a vid”. We’d sort of gauge who they were as a person, and if you got five votes from any 5 officers, you’d get tagged up. The officer core has the utmost trust for one another. Frizzled07: That’s basically what I do now. if I’m busy or whatever, I’ll have one of the guys who’s been in the clan 3-4 years platoon up with the applicant and tell me what they think. The guys have a better opinion of recruits because they’re around them a lot more. I always listen to what the guys have to say. There’s a lot of emphasis placed on personality. How important are stats in recruiting? Scharnhorst310: It doesn’t change. You still need to know how to play this game, at least the fundamentals. You can’t be liability because there are 14 other people in that battle that are depending on you to play up to a certain standard. But if you play up to that standard, and you have a bad attitude, you’re in the wrong clan. Frizzled07: WN8 is a unique tool because it measures damage output, which is very important, but most importantly, I look at how you play in your Tier X. I don’t care what your WN8 is. If you know where to shoot Tier X tanks and know how to play yours, that’s good enough for me. Tier X damage is most important. Do you attribute your success in Clan Wars to teamwork over individual player skill? TomECannon: Well, you trust your guys, and the communication on TeamSpeak was always very good. If someone needed help, everybody knew. There’s no cliques, and everyone platoons with each other, so everyone knew each other’s skill, the map, where to go, and you didn’t have to call as much. The players were reliable enough that if you asked to push, you didn’t have to micromanage. They knew who was going to come around the back, who was going to flank. There wasn’t a lot of “I’m dead, omigosh” If someone’s down, shift, and the callers knew each other’s skill in individual tanks, which was also good. Scharnhorst310: That’s what’s important. You have to put players, regardless of their skill, in the best position to succeed, and that’s on the battle callers. If you design a strat where you depend on someone to do something amazing, and they didn’t, that’s on you. We’ve had some of the top players in RS, and something we learned, even Frizz was like this when he first joined, that some players are what we call “pubstars.” They’re so used to public battles that they don’t understand teamwork, and they don’t understand how to read a battle from a team perspective. Sometimes in random battles, it’s pretty hard to get a good player to rush out and die for his teammates because often, your teammates aren’t gonna take advantage of that or notice what’s going on. In Clan Wars, that’s absolutely critical. Someone has to be the first guy around that corner. You have to know if you call someone to do that, they’re not gonna hesitate. You have to break players out of that pub mentality, and if you look at clans out there, a lot of them have former RS guys. I’m proud that we broke them out of that mold and helped make them very, very capable players. Yotaman: I came from 3 clans before RS, and they all had very strict battle comms. The battle caller was the only one allowed to speak. When I came to RS, my mind was blown with the amount of comms that we have. We don’t have useless comms like “I’m tracked” or “I got ammo racked”. There’s a lot of talking, but it’s all useful. TomECannon: When Frizz calls for someone to scout an area, the arty’s already looking there. He doesn’t have to micromanage anybody. What’s the dynamic between RS and RSRDD? Frizzled07: It’s different now than when scharn and Tom were leaders. Now, we use RSRDD as a grinding clan for people who fit but don’t have the amount of tanks you need. You can’t be effective in CW without at least 5 tanks, and in a real war, you may need 15. Baseten runs that for me and he does an excellent job. We work together sometimes; they do their own things sometimes. It’s an extra place for people we want in RS, but don’t not enough spots or they don’t have enough Tier Xs. TomECannon: When people were still grinding, Frizz and other people would often give their payouts to their clan mates to get their next tank. It was so annoying on the payout spreadsheet because you’d have to move things around. It was self-serving and not “We’re gonna give our top player and callers the major payout.” What separates RS from other clans? Frizzled07: RS has been around 9-10 years, and we have group Admirals who’re the guiding hand in the background. They don’t handle the day to day, but they’re in constant contact with officers. Then you have the officer core for each game that deal specifically with the game, and then there’s NCOs. I think one of the reasons we’ve been so successful and have been around for so long is because we’ve got an outside group who doesn’t just see the immediate picture; they see the big picture, which makes us stable. I don’t think we’ve ever had a schism where like, half the people leave. We’re very stable and that’s also a result of our recruiting process. Scharnhorst310: We have a lot of XOs, and we’ve had many over the years. We don’t pick the people who are gunning for it; you’re told, “You know what? You have the personality. We think you can do this, so you’re an officer now.” They don’t have a choice. We recruit good people, as well as good players, that we trust. We’ve never, in all the years, and out of the millions of gold we’ve earned, had any problems with people leaving and taking gold. We make sure if you’re ready to be an officer, we’ve got full trust in you. Frizzled07: The officer core in RS is different from everybody else. I spend a lot of time doing diplo, and a lot of the players are younger guys in college. The people in our clan typically work, so they don’t care about gold, the officer core especially. If there’s someone in our clan that we know doesn’t have a lot of money or can’t afford premium, we just give our gold during the payouts to them. It always happens. TomECannon: Dedication. The officers are always texting each other, and staying logged in on TeamSpeak. The lines of communication are so open that even to this day, I can still talk to RS members and see what’s going on. People who’ve left still go back and hang out in TeamSpeak because their friends are there and it’s a community that’s comfortable... and you won’t be annoyed. Scharnhorst310: Except by Frizz or Yota. TomECannon: Well, we try to ignore them. They’re on my ignore list and I can’t even hear them right now. *laughter* Scharnhorst310: We’re pretty hard on each other, but we’re still a very mature clan, and if you’re that type of person, then RS is your dream come true. TomECannon: We’re not trying to put you down; everybody knows that we’re here for each other’s benefit. The community aspect is the best part. Do you have specific goals as a clan? Scharnhorst310: Frizz, you answer. I just work here. Frizzled07: It’s hard to say. We’re really into Strongholds right now. It’s really intense because battles are 5 min apart, and they’re usually very competitive. We put more focus there, but when we recruit, the first thing we lead with is “We play Clan Wars”, so if you’re coming to play Strongholds only or tourneys only, then you’re probably not gonna fit in. Clan Wars is still our goal. More than anything, we’re trying to have fun. It’s a struggle for our officers because when we’re not fighting every night, the guys just either don’t show up or they show up and play really bad, which is even worse. Staying active is the officer’s goal. Perfect example:VILIN had us sit on their land while they foughtBULLS to keep the flank safe. When they came back, we went and fought, and the clan that we beat on the West Coast? Their subclan beat us like, 5 times in a row on Arctic Region. If we sit still, our guys just get a pub mentality. Does RS have any interesting traditions? Frizzled07: My first Clan Wars battle in RS, we won 15-2, and I was one of the 2 that was dead. I got shot by, I think, everyone on my team. Of course you can’t do that anymore because of tank locking. Everybody knew but you, and then all of a sudden, you just got wrecked. TomECannon: It was more of “All right, whoever kills Frizz right now gets 250 gold.” They should bring it back… everyone in RS has so many Tier Xs. They can afford to lose a few extra per night. Scharnhorst310: If you’re new, we always put you in Clan Wars your first day. It’s a trial by fire, and I want to watch that guy, I want to see people’s patterns, their strengths and weaknesses, and of course, them dying at the end from friendly fire. What changes would you make to Clan Wars? Frizzled07: There’s Clan Wars, tournaments, Strongholds, and now a Clan League. You’re adding more and more, which is great for the game, but you need to expand the size of a clan to compensate for all of them. Adding all these things exhaust an officer corp. Or make each event more worthwhile. Like in Strongholds, you don’t gain anything tangible or gold; tournaments give you gold, but to a limited number of people; Clan Wars makes a lot less gold, but it involves everybody. If you could find ways to equal it out, that’d be the best thing. Scharnhorst310: More land. What makes Clan Wars successful isn’t fighting over land or gold, it’s that you’re dealing with people. It’s the human relationships and interaction from dealing with people that have different characteristics and values that makes it rewarding. You don’t get to have that experience when you’re hitting landing zones every night and then getting knocked off. It’s important for a lot of new clans: important for recruiting, important for their own well-being. They can see themselves on a map and see tangible progress. TomECannon: Even back in the day with Africa, you had clans that weren’t very well known, but they didn’t care. They fought for only like, 74 gold a day, but to those clans, it meant everything because it was their land. It’s a badge of honor when you’ve got land to defend. [Note: More land and gold, among other features, are coming to the Global Map in GM2.0!] Are there any allies or friends you’d like to acknowledge? Frizzled07: Our oldest allies areDirg andKBEAR. Scharnhorst310: Nemesis79 andYankee from -G-.BBQ_Sub andACES have been huge. Patreal (now Pine_Sol_2000) and Tzimon from WAR, lots of good times with those guys. There’s a lot of memories, a lot of people we’ve met…SG. We’ve had a lot of friends. Mako26, sonicmonkey, boggintuf, dmgomes, captjade, whiskey_dod, bdl1000, zakaladas, ruukil, vect, Ertai, XenomorphZZ, just to name a few. I think Ertai just went on another championship trip in Poland this year. TomECannon: A non-exhaustive list: OTTER, The SharkTank, HerbalThrill, Vect, Ertai, Allurai, Swolja, brotherbonz, Gyarados, almtree, tofusmurf, GrannyW, Havoc, VegasRon, and Pine_Sol_2000... all great guys and Grannies who are the reason why I still play. I always look for the channel with these guys and hop in. Shout out to any place I’ve chilled in after long nights of Clan Wars/diplomacy… you know where you are. Do you any final words? Scharnhorst310: Even though I’m not in RS anymore, I still feel like I’m part of the clan. I’m in their TeamSpeak as often as I am in OTTER. It’s a good community, and I’m prouder of RS today than what we accomplished back in the day. It’s hard to keep going as an officer for any great length of time. TomECannon: If you look at the map now, it’s hard to name another clan that’s been here since the beginning. RELIC, but they’ve got like 4 subclans they can cycle through.HAVOK, maybe, but they’ve disbanded so many times. RS has been, and they’re always gonna be here. Like scharn said, it’s a badge of honor that we were in RS. I was proud to wear Red Sky during Ural Steel in Moscow... I love you guys. *sobs* Yotaman: Hold me.
Character and competence define Red Sky, the latest Clan to be featured on this week’s Clan Spotlight. RS has made a name as one of the oldest and most respected Clans in World of Tanks. As part of a larger gaming community, RS provides a comfortable community that current and former members fondly call their home. What’s the story of Red Sky? TomECannon: RS was really competitive in Navyfield before converting to World of Tanks in beta, and went to the first URAL Steel tournament. Scharn and I saw them on the front page, and that’s how we got involved. Luckily, we were able to participate in URAL Steel the second year as well. Scharnhorst310: We were looking to join a clan that was on the up and up that we could learn from. RS was fairly established at that point and they were on CW map. The clan population ballooned when Clan Wars first started. Since clans were limited to 100 members, RS created both RS and Red Sky Red Dawn Division to handle all of it's members. Many long term members were in RS, and RSRDD filled up with newer membership. RSRDD became very competitive very quickly. Me, TomE, and Mako26 all started in RSRDD. After a period of time, RSRRD ended up very strong in CW, and us new guys began to have a leadership role. Then it was determined that it’d be better to merge the best players from RS and RSRDD into RS and have a single strong CW division. We continue to cycle members between divisions to remain competitive on the map and in the game. TomECannon: Mako took over because he was the only one with major battle and leadership experience, and scharn was the #2 as a strategy and battle leader. At that time, you only needed 2 teams because of how the offsets worked. Our 2 teams were really good, and we had a bunch of flank callers and battle leaders around most of the time. Scharnhorst310: Really “good” in relative terms. We were part of the big alliance at the time, NASA, as one of the smaller clans just vying for scraps at the table of all the big guys. Luckily, we had a lot of really good leaders and officer who worked very hard, and we had very dedicated players so we could count on the same teams coming on every night. Over months of hitting landing zones, which you could do back then in the day to cover for other clans, we got better. We didn’t know how good we were because we weren’t facing the top competition, who were all in NASA. TomECannon: And then NASA broke up... for some reason... Scharnhorst310: Long story short, nobody wanted to share the scraps with the little guys. They felt what they felt, and we felt what we felt, and they formed up. It’s hard to describe if you’re not looking at the old European map, but we were in Northern Russia, right next toSSGS, BPN, MLP, andWOLF. Our position put us in the most dangerous spot, but also the only spot where a clan could hurt them right away. When the war started, no one expected us to do well, not even us, but something just clicked. We got the right maps with the right players and before we knew it, we went from one team a night to two, three, four, then five teams, and we started beating guys up. Eventually, we started pushing out, and probably my favorite battle, we beat MLP and they disbanded the next day. I don’t know if that was because of us, but I will say it was an important battle for morale as they represented what we were fighting against. I’d also be remiss not mentioning tremendous help we had from our members: whiskey_dod, absoluteroyal, Boggintuf, just to name a few. TomECannon: For us especially. Then recruitment just shot up too, that was great. Our domain was Eastern Russia, and no one wanted to attack us, so that was the first farming we’d ever done. Scharnhorst310: Before we knew it, we’d become famous, we’d become the big dogs. We were making 18-20k gold a night, and that was our first experience with people saying, “You guys are very good. Oh please, we don’t want to fight you.” The problem was that our guys weren’t the farming types, they didn’t care about how much gold they were getting; they wanted to fight. Eventually, our attendance started dropping drastically. It was a delicate position to be in: At one point, we went from Stalingrad to Denmark trying to find clans to fight, not out of malice, but just trying to keep members happy. Yotaman: That’s still the case. If we sit, we lose. Scharnhorst310: That became our motto: “We have to fight.” If we don’t, no one shows up, we start losing attendance, and before you know it, we’re weak and destitute. TomECannon: That’s the scariest thing. We didn't really care about the gold, so no one could appease RS with farming. They’re gonna attack and start a war. They’ll stay together and maintain that high morale as long as they keep fighting. Scharnhorst310: We like fighting, but it’s hard diplo to always work around that. I thought we did the best we could. We were always up front, always honorable, never backstabbers, everyone always got notice. If we were gonna attack a neighbor, we’d let them know, jump off the map, and then come back, because you don’t get close to someone along their borders and then jump them. It doesn’t work like that. Since RS really enjoys fighting, are you disappointed you weren’t in the Civil War? Frizzled07: It pissed me off because the clan that was selected like, #10 overall, we’d just mapped them twice on the West Coast. And we didn’t get picked at all. That pissed me off pretty good. Scharnhorst310: I was watching the whole thing, and I gotta be honest, I was shocked. I was shocked at some of the clans that were picked because RS’s reputation is that they’re gonna fight, they’re gonna fight tooth and nail and they’re gonna jump on grenades for clans. But I understand it from the standpoint that the guys picking the teams aren’t old dogs, they haven’t been around. It’s a new generation running things. That’s how Tom and I look at RS today: we’ve passed the torch to Frizz. It’s a new generation running things, and that’s something I don’t think they appreciated. TomECannon: I think I’d just joinedOTTER a few months before that, and I was really upset that RS wasn’t picked. One of the biggest travesties has been the addition of WN8. I’m not a unicum player, but what was special about RS was that we had a lot of players that are marked as “Good”, “Above Average”, or even “Average” on the new WN8 scale and were competitive. I would pick a lot of the "average" players over the top percent of players because they’re willing to take hits for each other and not care about their stats, and I think that was the most important thing. When battle callers are picking teams, they’re picking based on the highest win rate or WN8 or whatever, and not picking the teams that are the most effective and resilient. If you look at who won the Civil War or any war, oftentimes those clans that are on the fringe, that are meant to withstand as long as possible, they bail out, and they don’t give it their all, and they end up being a "let down" for the top clans that are fighting against the other top clans. I think it would’ve been very different if RS had been picked, based on resiliency alone. Scharnhorst310: We always punched above our weight class. We beat some of the top teams, and we wouldn’t always match them statistically in player skill, but you could count on our guys who had been playing together for a long time to perform. You could count on our officers and battle callers, our strategy, and the time we put in. We always had a shot. I’d go into every first battle with a clan and say, “Look, I never expect to win the first battle, but you can bet the second time we’re gonna have a chance because we’re gonna do our homework.” They might get lazy or sloppy after a win, but we don’t, and we’re gonna keep hitting them until we’ve got everything down on everything they’ve thrown at us, and we don’t stop. That resiliency, that dedication, is something that a lot of clans or their leaders don’t have, or aren’t prepared for. TomECannon: Look at how many clans have disbanded over the past few years, and RS is still chugging along with a lot of the same old members that are still competing today. Would you consider your success after NASA to be your greatest accomplishment? Scharnhorst310: It’s really hard to say which accomplishment we’ve had is the greatest. There’s quite a few that I’ve looked back on and I’m like, “That’s impossible. There’s no way”. Our joke in RS is that we won Clan Wars. Obviously that’s impossible, but in moments like those, we’d all sit back and laugh, “We won Clan Wars.” TomECannon: Every time we were involved, Clan Wars would change somehow: either the rules would change or a clan would disband. We used to be in Russia with-G- when they were first starting up, and we built a good relationship with them. The strong relationships RS built are, to me, RS’s greatest accomplishments. Scharnhorst310: Beating MLP was big because we were treated as little dogs during all those long meetings. It felt good to get some recognition for the months of hard work we’d done at that point: we knocked out ROTA, who’d been sitting on Brandenburg in Europe for 239 days. Nobody had been able to dislodge them before that. At one point, RS stretched from Eastern Russia all the way across Europe. There were a lot of accomplishments along the way that were all basically thought of as impossible, and we couldn’t have done it without friends and allies.. Yotaman: A source of pride for RS is how many times we went to URAL Steel. Frizzled07: While our history in Clan Wars is pretty illustrious, our success in tourneys might be even better. The first year ofWGLNA, we sent 2 teams to the finals, and that was while fighting a war at the same time. So we have a pretty big history in Clan Wars, tournaments, and now Strongholds too. You guys obviously have a lot of success. What advice do you have for clans struggling to find a place on the Global Map? TomECannon: We found success by being an honorable clan, and figuring out who was really dedicated to the clan and wasn’t gonna jump ship when things turned sour. Our players train each other, build each other up by saying, “If you just do this differently…” The members of RS take criticism well. I don’t, but RS does. In any other major clan or community, there’s like 100 different channels for people to hide in. In the RS TeamSpeak, you’re in the lobby or a platoon or company channel. I think the community aspect of the TeamSpeak channel overall is what helped make us successful. Scharnhorst310: I help out a lot of new clans, and the big thing I see is that they’re cliquey. One group wants to be dedicated and improve as a team in training rooms, and another group won’t be as dedicated. That’s painful for the group that wants to improve because you’re only as strong as your weakest link in Clan Wars, and if you have a few guys who don’t listen or do something wrong, it’s very hard to compete on a consistent basis. Everyone gets frustrated, and the clan falls apart. My recruiting phrase in RS was “I’m trying to find if RS is a good fit for you, and if you’re a good fit for RS.” The point is, you can’t recruit with mass invites, or be loose with who you let in. You’re trying build a strong foundation through recruitment that represents the values and desires of the clan, on top of its personality. If you don’t, clans tend to fracture when they experience setbacks or difficulties. Yotaman: We still say that to every applicant. We make them come and play and spend time. We don’t just take somebody; we find personality fits along with playstyle fits. We are as open and upfront as possible so that recruits can make the most informed decision for themselves as to whether RS is a good fit. How does someone apply to RS? Yotaman: Applicants apply on our clan website, come to our TeamSpeak to get applicant tags, and then they play with people in the clan. It’s not a quick process, and eventually our officers and NCOs vote on you. TomECannon: There’s a lot of trust in the officer core to find applicants that fit. We didn’t just recruit based on skill; that was secondary to whether that person would mesh well. A lot of that is due to the maturity of each member to know that the future is really in their hands. The membership would come to me or scharn about a recruit saying, “I platooned with this guy, this is what happened, and here’s a vid”. We’d sort of gauge who they were as a person, and if you got five votes from any 5 officers, you’d get tagged up. The officer core has the utmost trust for one another. Frizzled07: That’s basically what I do now. if I’m busy or whatever, I’ll have one of the guys who’s been in the clan 3-4 years platoon up with the applicant and tell me what they think. The guys have a better opinion of recruits because they’re around them a lot more. I always listen to what the guys have to say. There’s a lot of emphasis placed on personality. How important are stats in recruiting? Scharnhorst310: It doesn’t change. You still need to know how to play this game, at least the fundamentals. You can’t be liability because there are 14 other people in that battle that are depending on you to play up to a certain standard. But if you play up to that standard, and you have a bad attitude, you’re in the wrong clan. Frizzled07: WN8 is a unique tool because it measures damage output, which is very important, but most importantly, I look at how you play in your Tier X. I don’t care what your WN8 is. If you know where to shoot Tier X tanks and know how to play yours, that’s good enough for me. Tier X damage is most important. Do you attribute your success in Clan Wars to teamwork over individual player skill? TomECannon: Well, you trust your guys, and the communication on TeamSpeak was always very good. If someone needed help, everybody knew. There’s no cliques, and everyone platoons with each other, so everyone knew each other’s skill, the map, where to go, and you didn’t have to call as much. The players were reliable enough that if you asked to push, you didn’t have to micromanage. They knew who was going to come around the back, who was going to flank. There wasn’t a lot of “I’m dead, omigosh” If someone’s down, shift, and the callers knew each other’s skill in individual tanks, which was also good. Scharnhorst310: That’s what’s important. You have to put players, regardless of their skill, in the best position to succeed, and that’s on the battle callers. If you design a strat where you depend on someone to do something amazing, and they didn’t, that’s on you. We’ve had some of the top players in RS, and something we learned, even Frizz was like this when he first joined, that some players are what we call “pubstars.” They’re so used to public battles that they don’t understand teamwork, and they don’t understand how to read a battle from a team perspective. Sometimes in random battles, it’s pretty hard to get a good player to rush out and die for his teammates because often, your teammates aren’t gonna take advantage of that or notice what’s going on. In Clan Wars, that’s absolutely critical. Someone has to be the first guy around that corner. You have to know if you call someone to do that, they’re not gonna hesitate. You have to break players out of that pub mentality, and if you look at clans out there, a lot of them have former RS guys. I’m proud that we broke them out of that mold and helped make them very, very capable players. Yotaman: I came from 3 clans before RS, and they all had very strict battle comms. The battle caller was the only one allowed to speak. When I came to RS, my mind was blown with the amount of comms that we have. We don’t have useless comms like “I’m tracked” or “I got ammo racked”. There’s a lot of talking, but it’s all useful. TomECannon: When Frizz calls for someone to scout an area, the arty’s already looking there. He doesn’t have to micromanage anybody. What’s the dynamic between RS and RSRDD? Frizzled07: It’s different now than when scharn and Tom were leaders. Now, we use RSRDD as a grinding clan for people who fit but don’t have the amount of tanks you need. You can’t be effective in CW without at least 5 tanks, and in a real war, you may need 15. Baseten runs that for me and he does an excellent job. We work together sometimes; they do their own things sometimes. It’s an extra place for people we want in RS, but don’t not enough spots or they don’t have enough Tier Xs. TomECannon: When people were still grinding, Frizz and other people would often give their payouts to their clan mates to get their next tank. It was so annoying on the payout spreadsheet because you’d have to move things around. It was self-serving and not “We’re gonna give our top player and callers the major payout.” What separates RS from other clans? Frizzled07: RS has been around 9-10 years, and we have group Admirals who’re the guiding hand in the background. They don’t handle the day to day, but they’re in constant contact with officers. Then you have the officer core for each game that deal specifically with the game, and then there’s NCOs. I think one of the reasons we’ve been so successful and have been around for so long is because we’ve got an outside group who doesn’t just see the immediate picture; they see the big picture, which makes us stable. I don’t think we’ve ever had a schism where like, half the people leave. We’re very stable and that’s also a result of our recruiting process. Scharnhorst310: We have a lot of XOs, and we’ve had many over the years. We don’t pick the people who are gunning for it; you’re told, “You know what? You have the personality. We think you can do this, so you’re an officer now.” They don’t have a choice. We recruit good people, as well as good players, that we trust. We’ve never, in all the years, and out of the millions of gold we’ve earned, had any problems with people leaving and taking gold. We make sure if you’re ready to be an officer, we’ve got full trust in you. Frizzled07: The officer core in RS is different from everybody else. I spend a lot of time doing diplo, and a lot of the players are younger guys in college. The people in our clan typically work, so they don’t care about gold, the officer core especially. If there’s someone in our clan that we know doesn’t have a lot of money or can’t afford premium, we just give our gold during the payouts to them. It always happens. TomECannon: Dedication. The officers are always texting each other, and staying logged in on TeamSpeak. The lines of communication are so open that even to this day, I can still talk to RS members and see what’s going on. People who’ve left still go back and hang out in TeamSpeak because their friends are there and it’s a community that’s comfortable... and you won’t be annoyed. Scharnhorst310: Except by Frizz or Yota. TomECannon: Well, we try to ignore them. They’re on my ignore list and I can’t even hear them right now. *laughter* Scharnhorst310: We’re pretty hard on each other, but we’re still a very mature clan, and if you’re that type of person, then RS is your dream come true. TomECannon: We’re not trying to put you down; everybody knows that we’re here for each other’s benefit. The community aspect is the best part. Do you have specific goals as a clan? Scharnhorst310: Frizz, you answer. I just work here. Frizzled07: It’s hard to say. We’re really into Strongholds right now. It’s really intense because battles are 5 min apart, and they’re usually very competitive. We put more focus there, but when we recruit, the first thing we lead with is “We play Clan Wars”, so if you’re coming to play Strongholds only or tourneys only, then you’re probably not gonna fit in. Clan Wars is still our goal. More than anything, we’re trying to have fun. It’s a struggle for our officers because when we’re not fighting every night, the guys just either don’t show up or they show up and play really bad, which is even worse. Staying active is the officer’s goal. Perfect example:VILIN had us sit on their land while they foughtBULLS to keep the flank safe. When they came back, we went and fought, and the clan that we beat on the West Coast? Their subclan beat us like, 5 times in a row on Arctic Region. If we sit still, our guys just get a pub mentality. Does RS have any interesting traditions? Frizzled07: My first Clan Wars battle in RS, we won 15-2, and I was one of the 2 that was dead. I got shot by, I think, everyone on my team. Of course you can’t do that anymore because of tank locking. Everybody knew but you, and then all of a sudden, you just got wrecked. TomECannon: It was more of “All right, whoever kills Frizz right now gets 250 gold.” They should bring it back… everyone in RS has so many Tier Xs. They can afford to lose a few extra per night. Scharnhorst310: If you’re new, we always put you in Clan Wars your first day. It’s a trial by fire, and I want to watch that guy, I want to see people’s patterns, their strengths and weaknesses, and of course, them dying at the end from friendly fire. What changes would you make to Clan Wars? Frizzled07: There’s Clan Wars, tournaments, Strongholds, and now a Clan League. You’re adding more and more, which is great for the game, but you need to expand the size of a clan to compensate for all of them. Adding all these things exhaust an officer corp. Or make each event more worthwhile. Like in Strongholds, you don’t gain anything tangible or gold; tournaments give you gold, but to a limited number of people; Clan Wars makes a lot less gold, but it involves everybody. If you could find ways to equal it out, that’d be the best thing. Scharnhorst310: More land. What makes Clan Wars successful isn’t fighting over land or gold, it’s that you’re dealing with people. It’s the human relationships and interaction from dealing with people that have different characteristics and values that makes it rewarding. You don’t get to have that experience when you’re hitting landing zones every night and then getting knocked off. It’s important for a lot of new clans: important for recruiting, important for their own well-being. They can see themselves on a map and see tangible progress. TomECannon: Even back in the day with Africa, you had clans that weren’t very well known, but they didn’t care. They fought for only like, 74 gold a day, but to those clans, it meant everything because it was their land. It’s a badge of honor when you’ve got land to defend. [Note: More land and gold, among other features, are coming to the Global Map in GM2.0!] Are there any allies or friends you’d like to acknowledge? Frizzled07: Our oldest allies areDirg andKBEAR. Scharnhorst310: Nemesis79 andYankee from -G-.BBQ_Sub andACES have been huge. Patreal (now Pine_Sol_2000) and Tzimon from WAR, lots of good times with those guys. There’s a lot of memories, a lot of people we’ve met…SG. We’ve had a lot of friends. Mako26, sonicmonkey, boggintuf, dmgomes, captjade, whiskey_dod, bdl1000, zakaladas, ruukil, vect, Ertai, XenomorphZZ, just to name a few. I think Ertai just went on another championship trip in Poland this year. TomECannon: A non-exhaustive list: OTTER, The SharkTank, HerbalThrill, Vect, Ertai, Allurai, Swolja, brotherbonz, Gyarados, almtree, tofusmurf, GrannyW, Havoc, VegasRon, and Pine_Sol_2000... all great guys and Grannies who are the reason why I still play. I always look for the channel with these guys and hop in. Shout out to any place I’ve chilled in after long nights of Clan Wars/diplomacy… you know where you are. Do you any final words? Scharnhorst310: Even though I’m not in RS anymore, I still feel like I’m part of the clan. I’m in their TeamSpeak as often as I am in OTTER. It’s a good community, and I’m prouder of RS today than what we accomplished back in the day. It’s hard to keep going as an officer for any great length of time. TomECannon: If you look at the map now, it’s hard to name another clan that’s been here since the beginning. RELIC, but they’ve got like 4 subclans they can cycle through.HAVOK, maybe, but they’ve disbanded so many times. RS has been, and they’re always gonna be here. Like scharn said, it’s a badge of honor that we were in RS. I was proud to wear Red Sky during Ural Steel in Moscow... I love you guys. *sobs* Yotaman: Hold me.
Clan Spotlight: Red Sky 05/04/15