To FC Leaders.

Hello fellow Eorzeans,

This question pertains to the leaders or "higher ups" of the countless FC's that exist. I recently became part of a FC which I enjoy and have been given some responsibility, though my contributions and general participation. Although I know it is silly to have the notion that "Oh everybody we recruit will stay with us and the FC will always run 100%" I would very much like any tip/anecdotes on how to help make the FC run as smoothly as possible.

ideas like FC hierarchy structure, contributions, event planning, resolving FC disputes, recruitment or anything else you peeps can think of will be greatly appreciated.

I'm interested in this as well as my FC just promoted me to Leader, and I'm feeling a bit lost with it all.

I'm one of the top 3 in my FC so I'll answer what I can and what I do.
Hierarchy: you need top people with top responsibility like rank settings or housing establish, land settings, your FC gil. Then you need several officers that can invite people and activate FC buffs. Then you should have a veteran members rank that has access to all items chests that you trust. Then you have the regular members that have less access to item chest but with short message. Then you have the new recruits with no privilege so they can't sabotage your FC.
Event planning: Make some nights of the week for the specific things like Coil Tuesday, getting people through titan EX Wednesday, etc. Also can make and appoint a person to make a once-a-month FC event.
Recruitment: Look for people with the similar mindset that your FC believe in. If they don't fit and generally cause FC disputes unnecessarily, give them the boot or ask them to leave.
This is coming from a small FC with 20-30 people perspective.

As a leader from a linkshell in XI, I could toss in a couple suggestions that always worked for us when trying to keep morale and participation high with our members.

1. Always keep the group engaged. If you give free time, make sure they know how much time they have before the next event starts. This is particularly important when your FC is big enough for multiple groups. You should reward players that make an effort to show up on time and make sure that tardy ones understand that being late will get you left out.

2. Rate the members' interests. With no 24 man content, you can't get everyone involved at once unless you run separate things. Gauge interest in certain options your FC can handle. For example, figure out who needs to farm older turns of Coil and set aside the time for these people to get together.

3. Be actively involved. If members see you actively trying to make things happen, they'll probably be more willing to do things as a whole. I've noticed people are most likely to get bored when nothing is going on for an extended period of time or if they get left out. If leaders aren't participating, they may think they don't have to either.

As for resolving disputes, it kind of depends. If it's simply bickering between the two sides, you can put an end to it by asking them to move it to a private discussion or pull them aside yourself and attempt to diffuse the situation. Sometimes it's not worth getting involved yourself. If you feel the need to involve yourself, be ready to do whatever you might have to do. If it's a gear related thing, it helps if the leaders are already organized and determining how people should be looting ahead of time. It doesn't help a group's mentality if they see leaders scrambling over drops.

Hope this helps you!

I attained leadership of my FC after we had a great member crash. This happened to a lot of launch FCs after members got bored of FF14. I've learned a bit watching how my FC changed in number and hearing from others.

Hierarchy - Watch out who gets higher ranks. Ranks are NOT needed to make people feel important, so don't think of it too much as a rewarding system. I have seen accidents happen where someone gets a rank for something silly and they do something wrong to the FC. Rank is about responsibility, duty, and capacity to help out in managing the FC.

Contributions - Get your FC to do things in ways that feel like a bake sale. Have a money grinding day, work with economic minded members to get items on the market, and otherwise help out toward that new house or remodeling of the current one.

Events - Events are something many think too much on. Keep it simple - a raid group, or random manderville dance party, or even jumping into a friendly FCs house to have a naked hot tub party. don't have to plan in advance. If you really wanna inspire the group though, start getting someone to record videos of funny times. Members cherish seeing themselves in videos and are more likely to stay then.

Disputes - For the most part, stay out of them. It's mostly going to be interpersonal. If it's aimed at the FC or yourself for whatever reason keep calm and take it one step at a time. If it gets out of hand because the disputer just wants to dispute and troll, kick em - plain and simple.

Recruitment - Several ways, depending on your FC needs. Are you just zerging in members? Then have recruitment shouts in beginner areas all the time by select members. Want just a few newbies to train up? Have a quota set and reach that before suspending the shouts. Want high levels? Have some silver tongued members go through Mor Dhona and get friendly with non FC lvl 50's. There's actually quite a few like that (my FC got 3 in one day trying that).

End Game - Make sure to try to maintain a solid amount of end game members. This gives an FC the ability to participate in the meat of the game. Without enough end gamers, the ones who reach it alone will seek out more hardcore FCs. My FC lost a lot of our best members to this initially. It's one thing to have someone that can run a Brayflox, another to be able to gather some help for Coils.

General Advice - Keep the FC more personal for members. Call em out by name, invite them to raids and stuff, mention how ya don't wanna leave em out of the fun. Try to invent new ways to get together and have a zany fun time. I've had one of our members find out about the FF14 Machinas I put up on youtube and go crazy over it. I'm sure he's morel likely to stick around because of that. If I have people participate in them, they're also more likely to stick around. try not to forget your members and have them be numbers. It's about being a fun family, not who has more members race.

i concur with what everyone has said. Try to include everyone and don't have a "clique".
We always help members out either leveling or end game dungeons, raids, etc.
Also nice to do the special events together like easter, christmas or treasure hunts, etc.
While we do have a hierarchy setup for officers, i like to hear the opinion of all members before we do something, like for instance housing.
Even a simple hello when logging in and goodbye when logging out goes a long way

There are many different types of companies out there. Since mine is for adult casual without a lot of free time, we don't have days for certain events but when people ask for help or ask questions we have plenty of members there to help.

As for the rankings, everyone here has pretty much nailed it although I take care of the perks myself completely that way there is never a difference of opinions from other members. I rotate them out of course but if even one member has a request I'll do it over the rotation. I have one person that I can trust that if I really screwed up or lost ownership they can right it up.

My members run the FC as much as I do so it's very comradery based. Pick your style and go with it.

Make something different and originall, just not copying the other guilds... Maybe it will surprise you soon or late... ^^

(Okay, it's not helpy information, I know, sorry for being noob)

I am not a leader of my FC but have been in my FC since 2.0 launch. The one thing that I would like to see change in my FC is that all events are always at the same time. 8:00 pm EST. This is great for the people that are available to play at 8:00 pm every time. I would like to see event times changed up, maybe 8:00 pm one week and 9 or 10 pm the following or something like that. By keeping the same time you are only including the same people every time.

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Originally Posted by Vaughn

I am not a leader of my FC but have been in my FC since 2.0 launch. The one thing that I would like to see change in my FC is that all events are always at the same time. 8:00 pm EST. This is great for the people that are available to play at 8:00 pm every time. I would like to see event times changed up, maybe 8:00 pm one week and 9 or 10 pm the following or something like that. By keeping the same time you are only including the same people every time.

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And this right here can be super harmful to FCs because of that dreaded word: exclusion.

Never (this I'm learning is hard to do being my first FC) exclude a certain member, type of member, or if you have timed events you need to compensate for morning folks, evening folks, graveyard shift folks, and oversea members.

When the FC gets large enough, it's almost impossible for someone to not get excluded.

9 people in the FC and all 9 wants to be in a Coil static? Now what?

I've lost many members, most whom I've built a great personal bond with, to progression because my FC is casual. It happens I'm told and nothing you can do about it. Just remember that in order to achieve your ideals that there just might be some sacrifices, tons of hard decisions, and a few unhappy campers.

My biggest advice is "Zero Tolerance" policies are awful. Back in 1.0 I ran a successful LS for a long time and the lower-leaders convinced me to introduce "Zero Tolerance" rules and once I did my LS died about 2 weeks later. I lost a lot of friends over garbage rules I had to enforce.

Second biggest advice is think worst case when setting privileges. If it's open to abuse, you may want to think it over again.

Third piece of advice is you can't make everyone happy, so don't try. It just sets you up for failure.

As someone who is the leader of an FC: Handling disputes between members correctly is a big one.

Not everyone is going to get along 100% of the time. You will have disputes between members. If it seems like a fairly harmless debate or argument, then its probably best to stay out of it but keep an eye on things. If it escalates to something personal and vindictive (especially if its occurring in FC chat) - put your foot down about it (try to be firm but not angry sounding).

If someone in the FC says or does something that makes another user uncomfortable enough to come to you privately about the matter? Deal with it immediately. I can't stress this one enough. I'm not saying ban the person (that's just going to end badly), but make sure to pull them aside ASAP and talk to them about it. It may be a misunderstanding. However, the people in your FC have the right to feel comfortable in their group and gaming environment. If someone's being a huge jerk and saying really offensive and hurtful things to and about other members, make sure you get it stopped. If that means releasing the person from the FC because they won't quit - then that's what you'll have to do. Don't let your FC crumble because someone decides that they're so important that they don't have to abide by the rules or be a decent human being to the other members of the group.

One main rule for any FC, don't have chest access for newly joined members, as sadly that will get abused a lot

Quick question: when recruiting, is it wrong/frowned upon to have age as a factor? Thus far, the entirety of my 9-man FC are all 21 or older. Not that I want to exclude younger gamers, but our language/humor/values are on the mature side.

From my experience, you will end up with a group along the line of your liking of things, because all ones who doesn't feel things as you do, will leave before.
Some Officer is needed so the new members will see someone to rely on for things. Just be careful, if you get good officers you will run a great FC, if you get one bad apple you risk the good people leaving.

About problems, just make sure Members have a place to put their complains or any method to reach you when they need. Unresolved little things will go only worse with time.

I saw if you organize sometime little events, it helps a lot. FATE runnings together are much appreciated.

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Originally Posted by CodeCass

Quick question: when recruiting, is it wrong/frowned upon to have age as a factor? Thus far, the entirety of my 9-man FC are all 21 or older. Not that I want to exclude younger gamers, but our language/humor/values are on the mature side.

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Not exactly, but you'll exclude a lot of people who would normally fit in despite their age. Just asking for a more mature mindset would be good enough in my opinion. Once a long time ago we found out a member was only 16 and we were absolutely shocked because he was quite mature and had a deep voice even.

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Originally Posted by CodeCass

Quick question: when recruiting, is it wrong/frowned upon to have age as a factor? Thus far, the entirety of my 9-man FC are all 21 or older. Not that I want to exclude younger gamers, but our language/humor/values are on the mature side.

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I'm one of the leaders of my FC/Community and I can tell you that age really isn't a problem at all. We were founded by a group of 6 of us that are all over the age of 25. We have had a lot of experiences with younger folks in the past and know that it is really not for us.

We chose to keep the age limit at 21. We currently have about 35 active members and that's our target number. We're staying small for the purpose of building friendships. If you recruit well, present yourselves in a positive light, and really make an effort to be the kind of member you would want in the FC then you'll be fine. Just remember that everything you do as a leader needs to be in the best interest of the group, not you. Remember your members come first and without them, you're just a lonely guy with a tag.

Having a unified goal is helpful, so maybe look at what you would like to be and model the FC after that. My goal is for our FC to be seen as a positive member of the Behemoth community so we host server-wide events and try to help at any time we can. Hopefully that gives people the idea =)

Anyways there's a lot to leading an FC and it's a challenging job. It's also a rewarding one when you get it right and all your members are just happy to hang out with each other.

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Originally Posted by AmyNeudaiz

Not exactly, but you'll exclude a lot of people who would normally fit in despite their age. Just asking for a more mature mindset would be good enough in my opinion. Once a long time ago we found out a member was only 16 and we were absolutely shocked because he was quite mature and had a deep voice even.

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Thanks for that! And that is great advice! I think that would be a much better way to go as well.

We try to keep everyone as included as possible. We have about a medium sized FC. We fluctuate between about 50 to 70 active members at any given point. But we make a strong attempt to keep everyone engaged and let everyone get to know each other. Because of this we have a pretty strong bond in spite of the rather large number. We also recognize people's merits. We created ranks for our Coil Captains because they were strong leaders who took initiative in creating and maintaining their teams. We created ranks for our maxed out crafters who always help everyone out. We even created a new rank recently for a gardener who was a guy that really did a lot of research into the gardening system and has maintained our gardens really well.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CodeCass

Quick question: when recruiting, is it wrong/frowned upon to have age as a factor? Thus far, the entirety of my 9-man FC are all 21 or older. Not that I want to exclude younger gamers, but our language/humor/values are on the mature side.

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The world is your oyster. Set what age limit you want. I started out just 21+ and now I've gotten rid of the limit now that we've settled a lot. Don't worry what others thinks and do what you'd like.

There is currently a bug (That SE refuses to fix) where someone with access to modifying members rank can assign someone above their own rank. This has been used to empty FC chests in the past. Be on the lookout for this and under no circumstance allow rank modifications.

Have fun!

Leaders need to remember to take time for themselves too.

Be willing to listen with patience. Sometimes it is like being a parent... or a cat herder. :3

Be willing to help those who need it. Don't just wait for them to ask for help; be proactive and know where in the game your members are and what their interests are.

Don't be afraid to delegate!

Try to have a 'focus' of sorts for your FC. Whether it's rp, endgame firsts, all lalas (lalas are friends, not food :p ), etc.

Be transparent in leadership. Be up front and honest and respectful of your FC mates. Have solid reasons why you make the decisions you do.

Be a cheerleader. Everyone's energies in the game flag at some point. Show them you care! Don't berate anyone. Watch for bad feels or low morale and see what you can do to mitigate it.

Say Hi to everyone. Spend a little time running dungeons or doing events with everyone if you can. (My FC has about 80 members currently as a point of reference.)

Rank and hierarchy - your mileage may vary. I use lots of "vanity titles" in my FC to recognize those who really help out and are generally awesome people or have achieved some rank in game (example: Gold Chocobo, Monky King, Yojimbo, Sensei, etc.)

Use outside static communication like FC website or the FC forums on Lodestone. This is a good way to coordinate stuff if you have many people who play during drastically different times. Also, group photos are fun!

remember your multiples of 8 ^^

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Originally Posted by Sadana

Have fun!

Leaders need to remember to take time for themselves too.

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This. Being a leader is quite a full time responsibility but don't let things that go wrong being you down. If your morale is lowered because members leave and such then others might start to question their place in your FC. Can't state how many times I took to the rod and reel so I could collect myself and make better decisions not based on personal feelings.

Oh and about that zero tolerance policy being a bad idea. It isn't depending on what it is. I have no tolerance on drama or folks that belittle other members. We might curse like sailors and have tons of sarcasm but we do not allow bullying or demoralizing members at all.

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Originally Posted by Desidious

Oh and about that zero tolerance policy being a bad idea. It isn't depending on what it is. I have no tolerance on drama or folks that belittle other members. We might curse like sailors and have tons of sarcasm but we do not allow bullying or demoralizing members at all.

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Yes, after some issues between a few members, I created, posted, and publicized our Anti-Harassment Policy. It's a good thing to have in place. It's not like such a policy means I'm swinging the ban hammer freely or have any "one strike and you're out" policy. I talk privately with people and try to explain as best I can how/why what they say/do has a negative affect on others. Only if they continue to be an ass/creeper would I encourage them to play elsewhere. Fortunately it has never gotten this far.