This announcement topic is to describe Sharkbrew's future goal for the community, why we need to achieve those goals, and how we are going to achieve them
PvP & Clanning Updates
Around June 2018, we were approached by Mod Sween from Jagex who wanted feedback on weapon mechanics updates that may affect PvP community. At that time, we did not have the community(esp. the main community) well integrated enough to help provide the necessary and feedback value that he was looking for. As a result, communications slowly died off and he eventually departed the site.
As much as the JMods are game moderators and are community oriented, they are still answerable to a managerial chain of command whose primary aim is: How do we make more money? If I dedicate X number of Jmod hours on this update(business cost), will I get back Y amount of players(revenue). This could be one of the reasons why highly upvoted reddit posts often are addressed directly and even implemented in game by Jagex because they see the value in such posts.
Thus, in order for PvP/clanning related update suggestion to achieve this same level of attention by Jagex, we have to emulate this value for them.
Why should we going to provide this value?
For years now, Jagex has either ignored or resisted our concerns and our appeals to introducing updates that would greatly benefit our community. Furthermore, as of late, they have implemented updates that have wiped out entire segments of our community. Unfortunately, due to the perceived small size of our community and our distinct dividedness, Jagex will continue to see us as the tiny minority of the community that they can continue to ignore without any risk or harm to their reputation.
How are we going to provide this value?
In order to provide this value, we need to centralize the entire community under one platform, this is so that ideas can be vetted within our scene, and thus we can provide the value, which reddit does already, of like-minded individuals who are ultra focused on this area of the game.
Primary Goals - Activity and Ideas
Create a portal that aggregates the activity of clanning and PvP
Create a system that encourages the community to share ideas
Generate community momentum behind said ideas
With the above systems in place, we shall go on the offense and start pushing our ideas and agenda to Jagex and to the rest of the community
Concurrent Goals - Addressing Fundamental challenges of Clanning
Lowering the barrier of entry for recruitment
Fully connect Sharkbrew with our other social media platforms
Community Events
Toxicity on Sharkbrew platforms
Address or defend the image of clanning that has been heavily slated by bias 3rd party official fansites, i.e. Reddit
Encourage members of the community to start new clans
Activity and Ideas
We have recently launched the League system that tracks CWA and wilderness activity of clans. The goal of this system is to encourage healthy competition between clans while also primarily serving as a recruitment and motivational tool for clans. As the Sharkbrew brand name is fairly well established, we want new visitors to the site to be impressed by the sheer activity that clanning provides.
We hope that with majority of the clans joining our league system, we can then use this to attract like-minded members to start contributing PvP and clanning related ideas to help boost the interaction in the community- similar to the modus operandi of the working community at Reddit. Once we get the momentum going, it is going to be extremely difficult to stop.
Secondly, we are going to expand the League system to include tracking individual Pking. This additional will complete the recruit cycle on sharkbrew- something which I will elaborate on later.
Now with the community being behind said ideas that were generated before, our goal is to push these ideas on various forums to Jagex. Unlike the previous time where it was only 75~ votes and comments, we hope to aggregate the opinions of a few hundred active clanners, thus showing to Jagex that we mean quite a fair bit of business.
Addressing Fundamental challenges of Clanning
As we are facing an older user base with less time to commit to the rigors of clanning, Sharkbrew's goal is to reduce some of the monotonous tasks of running a clan, thus hopefully we can free up time for what leaders and members enjoy most about clanning- participating in events and fighting other clans
Lowering the barrier of entry for recruitment
All clans today actively recruit in game, and this is their primary source of active members. I have idled in 4 social CCs while training my med account, and I have come across quite a fair number of pures and PKers who generally dominate said discussions in those CCs. The market is there, but clans have to set aside time and effort to recruit such members.
Passive recruitment
The origins of a pure community/community forums(zybez) stems from the root idea that by posting your clan's aftermath topic, visitors to the site would be inclined to register on your clan forums to join your clan. This form of recruitment requires the least effort on behalf of the clan. Our goal is to improve the passive recruitment for all clans using sharkbrew, and we shall achieve this with the following:
Merging Sharkbrew twitter
Sharkbrew's twitter account currently runs a daily top BH hunter highscore list. Our audience base consist mostly of BH and 1v1 pkers. While our follower count is not amazing, our twitter posts reaches out to around 800-1k users daily.
Our goal is to eventually post clan aftermath topics on our twitter and synchronize our twitter audience with Sharkbrew forums, thus exposing clans to a whole new audience base
1v1 ELO league system
By expanding the league system to include 1v1 PKers, we hope to complete the recruitment cycle where players who are competitive in 1v1 uses our league system, is then exposed to clanning, and hopefully these players will eventually join one of the clans using Sharkbrew.
@Moniwill be leading the above system
Wiki System
Our plan is to build a PvP and clanning oriented wiki system that contain guides for for clanning and PvPers. Written by people who know the scene best . With a bit of SEO management, we hope that our guides would be the first link people click when searching for "1 defense pure guide"/"how to make a zerk" on google, and ultimately be exposed to clanning when visiting our site
@Eeveeis leading the above system
Toxicity on Sharkbrew platforms
We are aware of the toxicity that stems from our platforms, and in 2016 Sharkbrew can probably hold the record for being the most toxic community, unless you were also drinking tap water in flint michigan. Our goal is to significantly clamp down on the toxicity that stems from our platforms, both on forums and in discord. We understand that we cannot grow if we were to remain in a state of toxicity as new members would be put off from joining the clanning community.
As such, the rules have been completely revamped and we are going to push for a competitive community that is also clean in the process
@Eeveeis leading the the moderation team
@Breakand @Yakis leading the mod team for discord
Community Events
In the coming months, you will see more community events being hosted by Sharkbrew. This is to publicize the strengths and activity of our scene when we eventually connect with our other social media platforms
@Kyewill be leading this system
Fully connect Sharkbrew with our other social media platforms
As mentioned earlier, we will be synchronizing the forums with our twitter platform. Once we have enough users, we will be reaching out to reddit as well. The aim is once again to blast out the sheer activity of clanning.
People are looking for clans on 2007scape reddit, however majority of the content is dominated by "Lets shit on clanning/pvp" memes that such posts don't get the attention they deserve.
Address or defend the image of clanning that has been heavily slated by bias 3rd party official fansites, i.e. Reddit
This is connected to the previous point where in addition to advertising the activity of clanning, we are also going to create a campaign to help mitigate some of the poor image clanning has suffered, i.e. under DMM/Mod Jed for example.
Encourage members of the community to start new clans
With the above objectives achieved, we hope more community members would be motivated to start a clan and join into the fight fest!
Looking for New Ranks!
In summary, to achieve all of our above goals, Sharkbrew is looking for new ranks. If you are motivated enough to help us and by extension help the community, please make an application topic here:
https://www.sharkbrew.com/community/index.php?/application/form/3-apply-to-become-a-sharkbrew-rank/
In the application topic, we would like for you to state which system you like to work on/improve
We also welcome any new ideas as we are flexible enough to incorporate new ones- as long as our goals are achieved!
