Why inactivity hit BoS so hard was that it struck all of our leaders and key players... I was there,- so I know =) Like said BoS was an awesome tribe, one of the best i have ever been and ive been in quite many.
Well, I don't want to argue over which tribe has been hit the most seriously by RL issues, so let's just add my own two cents from my viewpoint. I know that [BA]'s whole leadership structure (but me
has changed several times during the years due to several of the best regional leaders or co-leaders facing with RL issues and needing to leave. We've lost the complete K61 leadership during the first two years for maybe 3 times, all but 1 of the original northern leaders, and all of our original southern leaders. Practically every key position has had several owner changes during the years and some were having to leave at quite unfortunate times, such as like in the beginning or the middle of a war against other top tribes directly competing against these leaders' regions or teams.
(Some were being able to rejoin 1-2 years later, which I consider quite an achievement - I mean, that they were actually
returning after dealing with their RL problems, even if that lasted longer than a typical player would completely forget this whole game)
That's quite a few opportunities for a single tribe, or whole regions to collapse, but it
never happened.
Just a 'recent' example is our southern region, which was losing it's leader just in the days the whole Wisdom war started, with two other key locals turning unavailable due to medical or family crysises on the first week, causing a massive drop in early stats (and land ownage) and normally firing back as a serious morale bash to the remaining members in the region (in this case, only a dozen allied members!). If you remember the initial odds in the K74-94 region, and that it has been completely surrounded by several hostile top tribes (MOJO from north, Wisdom F + Eturg from both west and east, while Wisdom + Eturg have also controlled HALF of the Corridor continents, all-around our spreaded out clusters) you could safely say we
should have collapsed there in a matter of weeks and losing the whole region and all the remaining local players due to the sheer time consumption it has caused to them. I know for a fact that several of them have had no weekends, normal sleeping, nor free time at all for
months.
All I can see from this that we might have chosen a
different way of dealing with these problems and were more efficient in replacing losses or handling them on a way which caused no morale drops or starting a chain reaction. We might have simply worked as a team, and balanced out the main stress factors by helping each others out in our most stressed periods, whether I'm speaking about tagging and dodging 6-8000 incomings for weeks on southern accounts, taking part in organizing a time consuming operation or just keeping up the spirit. That's why I'm highly skeptical about others simply referring to
undefeatable external issues, as that's like saying "hey, we failed, but it's
not our fault!". I feel it's so easy to simply accuse dire
external issues, but truth to be told, if you're having a real team of several dozen players, and that is indeed a
community, and not just some players hanging together for some easy benefits, negative effects of external issues can be
always minimized, the only trick is to
- have a community
- which is interested enough in solving the situation
Failing to build up such a community, in other words, failing to provide your fellow members the environment they are willing to protect even if it takes some "sacrifice" from them is
not an external failure, even if it sounds easier to say so. It's not necessarily a leadership failure either (even if they are always responsible for that to an extent), but the failure of the whole team - as a team.
if there are
multiple exceptions around, then rather forget those magical external issues. The real issues are almost certainly coming from inside.
EDIT: and just to make it clear; I'm not specifically targeting Brotherhood with this statement, but every single tribe which has ever chose the path of simply pointing to undefeatable external issues instead of realizing their own role in their own fall.
