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Guides:An In Depth Guide to Forming Groups

Take a look at it and speak your mind, please. All criticism, corrections or advice are appreciated. Hopefully it won't bore too many of you unconscious. :P --Penguinpyro 07:14, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Guide has been split in half for everyone's convenience, the first half going here. I will be submitting the first half for review soon, the second half to follow afterwards.--Penguinpyro 12:58, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Comments

Alright, first off, drop the "full disclosure" section. You're playing down your credibility right out of the gate, which isn't a good thing. You want the opener to be a hook, make readers think, "hey, this guy knows what he's doing!"

Instead of talking about how you could be biased, play up your group experience as a resume; say, "I lead this large group, so I'm more qualified to speak about this than master sgt. Xxxj0e$hmo3xxX over there." If you're comfortable with it, you could even try to work anecdotes of your experiences in throughout the text as a framing device; it shows that certain "tactics" are more than just ideas, but actual result-givers.

So far as the content goes, it seems alright, although I confess it's an ungodly hour over here so I can't be motivated to give an overly close reading. However, while content is good, the style seems a little bland- the entire thing is essentially an oversized list. While this is does a fine job at making each of your points stand out, overusing it makes it quite a chore to read; that's not including the fact that each of the sections seems to use a different formatting. Given the size of a lot of your bullets, you may want to consider folding them into paragraphs; that way, you can cut down on page length (especially if you combine similar bullets) and adopt a more natural tone, which should increase flow and readability- just make sure you don't go tot he other extreme and write a wall of text!

For your bullet points, I'd do two things. First, pick a formatting and stick with it. use EITHER * or # and be sure to bold the main point. Second, cut the commentary down to a line or two for each; when people read a bullet, they expect a brief explanation- read the bolded idea statement, then a quick summary of what that statement means. If you're going on for three or four lines, you should stop and ask yourself, "will people actually read all this?" If it's getting long enough that you have to think about it, then you might want to cut down the commentary, split it into several bullets, or turn the bullet into a paragraph.

That's all I have for now. Hopefully I'm still lucid enough this early in the morning that that all made sense. ~ Red Hawk One ^{Talk | space for lease} 07:48, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Just a few quick notes from me as I read through the text:

Exiting. Make that Exit, plox - I had to read it three times to get that you don't mean Exciting
Spambots on your forum. Yes, this is pretty damn specific and out of the blue, so get rid of that paragraph or shove it into an appendix or a separate section about managing forums, dammit.
Hierarchy. I find it odd how many (especially military-themed) groups overdo it, ending up with 24 ranks and 13 squads for their 9 members. Always found the best approach to cut down on ranks and squads as much as possible and keep just as much distinction as needed - which in most cases meant that there is no real hierarchy at all. It has worked for Cobra, South West Anarchists and Big Coffin Hunters for me, and can even work with groups as large as Feral Undead (although by merit and people skills, there will always be members whose voice holds more sway than others).
Role in Malton. Many Pro Survivors don't define themselves by killing zombies -in fact, many of the better ones avoid to engage zombies whenever possible and prefer to work around them. Just ask The Big Prick, Malton College of Medicine or 404. (For the latter, I have killed more survivors than zombies - which was just one measly GKer at Blackmore 4(04), who absolutely couldn't be dealt with otherwise and who could do a lot of damage by attacking Blackmore's best defense, its running genny.)

-- Spiderzed ▋ 09:30, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Sounds reasonable, so I made those changes or will make those changes. Seems I miss a lot of things when I'm too busy enjoying the sound of my own (writing) voice. Red Hawk, you seem like an expert on writing. Maybe you should write a guide on writing guides. That would be awesome. :P --Penguinpyro 11:58, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

I would actually punt on the Zombie/PKer/Bounty Group sections, reposition this as a Forming a Survivor Group Guide, dump all the disclaimers and just stick with what you know. Then you can really hone in on what is important to forming a survivor group, what new survivor group leaders really need to consider when starting off, and what are the tried-and-true lessions that successful survivor groups follow. Why water this down with conjecture on subjects that you admit to not really knowing, when you can speak authoritatively on Survivor groups, refocus this, and make it really shine? -MHSstaff 18:41, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

^ This. --Ross less ne s s^{Want a Location Image?} 19:43, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Shifted the emphasis to survivordom, jettisoned zombie/PKer advice and disclaimer and added more stuff overall.--Penguinpyro 13:19, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

I added a lot of other stuff. Any more comments or advice please? --Penguinpyro 05:49, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Still needs finishing. You've got a few (add more later comments still) --Ross less ne s s^{Want a Location Image?} 13:16, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

A couple of observations on the new stuff:

TinyURLs: Note that they are often abused to conceal shock or malware sites, so that many people don't open TinyURL links out of principle. (Especially not in a massive multiplayer game, which by statistics alone hosts quite a few asshats who'd have no qualms over doing such things.) Cobra works for that reason with a mix of the full wiki URL and of TinyURLs for cramming extra message into graffiti.
Gabba Gabba could be a better alternative to TinyURLs if it ever gain enough popularity. ~ 18:21, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Revive Policy: The groups I've seen running into the least trouble with PKers are those who revive them indiscriminately (and otherwise abstain from antagonizing them). Poster child of this is MCM, which limits its DNR list to serial griefers and others who have really worked on it, and in fact maintains/has maintained friendly relations to a few reasonable PKer groups as the Philosophe Knights or Mostly Harmless.
By treating PKers like everyone else, PKers might randomly PK a few times, and then move on to funner targets. - The more effort you put into antagonizing PKers (such as by scanning and then abandoning them), the more they notice and get interested into you: Either to punish you for your attitude towards them, to hear you moan and bitch over getting PKed (as you publicly show that your care about PKing), or by concluding that you might know about the RG and thus snitch on them to raise their profile. Either draws a big target on you, and makes your worries about PKers being a threat a self-fulfilling prophecy.

-- Spiderzed ▋ 16:30, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Rather than taking a "side," just list both approaches, and talk about the pros and cons for each Revive policy. Group leaders can then decide what works best for their group or situation. -MHSstaff 20:31, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Some more observations:

This guide sorta has two distinct parts. The first part is a general roadmap for starting a group. The second part is specific to survivor groups. I wonder if it makes sense to split this into two separate guides?
For your propaganda section: I have a general, half-assed, unfinished propaganda guide that you may or may not find useful for your stuff. It is zombie-based because that is what I know but some of the general ideas may transfer to survivor-based propaganda. It's gathering dust right now because I stopped caring about it. Hopefully it helps. Equally likely, you may find it completely useless. -MHSstaff 20:21, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Developing Guides